“Librarians are crucial to realizing Open Education as they are in charge of organizing knowledge”
Name: Antonio Martinez-Arboleda
Position: Teaching Fellow and Co-Director of the Centre for Research in Digital Education
Expertise: Open Educational Resources, Open Educational Practice, Digital Education, Spanish Language and Politics, Podcasting, Poetry
Institution: University of Leeds
Country: UK
More info: Home Page Twitter Video
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4391-5417
An interview with Antonio Martinez-Arboleda on 18 November 2021
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your experience with Open Educational Resources?
I’ve been involved in Open Educational Resources (OER) for about 13 or 14 years. Currently, I’m Academic Lead for Open Educational Practice at the University of Leeds as part of our digital transformation agenda. I’m involved in a number of projects including OER, but not only OER. I remember very fondly when I started with Open Educational Resources around 2008. One of my first experiences was with HumBox, a repository of Open Educational Resources for arts and humanities. This was part of a big plan to support individual subjects within the Higher Education sector in the UK to have their own repositories and to create their own sharing communities.
I was on the team that contributed to the development of HumBox, and it was a truly amazing experience. We still have a lot of resources in that repository; people still upload resources there. It was one of the success stories of sharing, for all the subject centres. Unfortunately, the subject centres were defunded. The government withdrew support for them, so that had a knock-on effect in a number of things, including the sustainability of these repositories. Sadly, over the years we have seen some “de-investment” from governments into Open Educational Resources infrastructure. This is problematic because it sends the wrong signal to institutions. There are many things in education, and in society in general, that do not lend themselves to invisible “magic hands” of the free market to actually fix them. So although this was a beautiful story of how to promote sharing, and we had a lot of academics sharing resources there, the lack of support made it somehow forgotten.
How is the University of Leeds, in particular, working with Open Education now, in lieu of the national infrastructure not being as well supported?
I’m aware that many of you reading this may be librarians. I have to say that without your involvement, these Open Educational Resources, services, and ideas would be impossible because librarians are in charge of organising knowledge.
We’re doing a lot of things, actually. I’m very proud to be involved in the Open Educational Resources initiatives we are leading at the University of Leeds. However, because of the absence of a proper national repository of Open Education Resources, institutions have to consider whether to participate in other institutional repositories, or to create their own. They must ask themselves: What is a repository for? Do we need one repository for each institution? What type of repository? And we’ve been working with a lot of colleagues in the library at the University of Leeds to propose a referatory; a website that would embed links from our internal repository to Open Educational Resources that are being published either by our digital education services or by any colleague within the institution. This is a very solid project; we have a working group, we have a model, we know what we want it to look like, the functionalities, etc., and it’s part of our digital transformation.
I’m aware that many of you reading this may be librarians. I have to say that without your involvement, these Open Educational Resources, services, and ideas would be impossible because librarians are in charge of organising knowledge.
How do some of the other areas that we work in at the library feed into Open Education? So with open research, we have a research data repository and we have an Open Access repository of research publications. Are they examples of Open Educational Resources or not?
For me, the difference between research outputs and learning and teaching outputs is not that clear-cut.
Well, they are, and they are not. It depends on how you want to look at it. My remit institutionally is Open Educational Resources and that is conceived as materials that are produced with the intention of using them for teaching. So it’s always a very dodgy differentiation because if you produce an academic article, is the article actually not being produced with the purpose also to be taught; so that students can read the academic article? It’s a complicated differentiation because of the idea of what is the main purpose of this resource? There are different objectives when somebody produces and shares knowledge. It may be that you share because you want to communicate with your research community, but it may be that you also have in mind potential students who may want to access those resources.
For me, the difference between research outputs and learning and teaching outputs is not that clear-cut. But if you want to draw a line, I would say that it is the translation into different media or different products of research papers. For instance, imagine that I have a research paper on Open Education and then it is an academic article, it’s not really accessible to everybody. If I take that article and produce a video explaining some of the ideas and make it accessible to a wide range of audiences, then that research spin-off should be considered an Open Educational Resource, and actually teaching material.
There is a relationship between the fact that those types of materials, or the research and the data, need to be openly licensed themselves so that they can be used to create those Open Educational Resources as well.
Who has benefited from Open Education at the University of Leeds? And what about beyond the University of Leeds? What are the key benefits for us as an institution and for global colleagues who benefit from our research?
When it comes to sharing Open Educational Resources, I like to differentiate between targeted sharing and generic sharing.
Sometimes it feels that we have been developing a culture of Open Educational Resources for the last nearly 20 years without much result. If you go to your average academic and ask, do you share Open Educational Resources? Do you do it regularly? Do you engage in building knowledge collaboratively? The answer for a majority of people is, “no” or “very little”. So it may feel that we have failed, but actually in the last 20 years we have created a lot of research about Open Educational Resources and Open Education. We have created infrastructures, we have designed all sorts of protocols on what to do, and how to do it, and we have Creative Commons licenses, which is instrumental for Open Education.
We have the infrastructure and the human capital ready for a time like now when a number of transformations are taking place that are going to be led by openness. So in a way I would say that one of the big achievements of the OER movement — and I like to call it a movement, academic activists — is that we have laid the foundations for what is going to happen, and what is happening now. So in terms of specific benefits for colleagues, I think we still have to see the bulk of change, a transformation, and I like to think also a cultural transformation.
When it comes to sharing Open Educational Resources, I like to differentiate between targeted sharing and generic sharing. Targeted sharing is sharing that you do because you know that there are people on the other side of the repository who are going to be using your resources, who are interested in reusing or repurposing them. Generic sharing, on the other hand, is simply uploading resources for an undetermined audience of people you don’t know, which may or may not lead to actual reuse by learners and teachers across the world. I think it’s very important that we differentiate between these two types of sharing. Why? Because I have seen that many colleagues are not really keen on simply putting things up without knowing whether there is a real need for it, or whether they are going to have students and teachers who are going to reuse it. Whereas the opposite occurs when you have a specific demand or need; when you are aware of a community of learners, or any other type of community, who have told you that they would benefit from you publishing the results. In this case, immediately the love for sharing comes up and transforms attitudes, transforms beliefs about sharing and the magic happens.
This is what has happened in particular with a project that some of my colleagues here in Leeds are involved in. We are doing targeted sharing, which is sharing for other colleagues in other universities that they have contact with to be able to repurpose the resources that we are producing, adding things to the resources that we produce — a sort of co-creation, collaborative creation — and using them for specific purposes, such as courses they have in conjunction with other institutions. So this type of sharing makes people feel enthusiastic.
The key here is that despite the fact that you know that those resources are for a specific audience who are asking you to share with them, and you know them and they are part of your community, when you share you actually do it openly for the rest of humanity and you do it within an infrastructure, a repository in this case, that allows dissemination and allows reuse by anybody in the world.
What do you see as the key successes of Open Education so far? And what still needs to be done for Open Education to really take hold?
I think we need to better understand how and why people share.
The normalisation of Creative Commons licenses has been a key success. The fact that you can go to YouTube or Flickr and have an option in big platforms to use a Creative Commons license is a massive achievement that has not been celebrated loud enough. People understand that there are other ways of sharing apart from the traditional licenses and academics are more familiar with the licenses. That’s a massive step. Platforms are recognising those licenses and academics are understanding that there are those opportunities for sharing.
The relatively top-down, yet still necessary, step to have Open Access for research assets is crucial as well. And obviously having an infrastructure and human capital of expertise within librarians and academics and Open Educational Resources. The bulk of academic research in this area is tremendous.
What still needs to be done? I think we need to better understand how and why people share. We need to understand the reasons why people choose to share or not to share their resources. There are a lot of sociological studies about this, but I think we need to start to consider the activity of sharing from square one. Do not think about sharing OER, think about sharing resources — sharing them publicly — whether it is with a Creative Commons license or whether it is in a different way. Whether it is in a repository that has been created by an institution, or is shared through more conventional means. Think about why academics share to audiences that are generic without having a specific request to share by potential users. And if we understand sharing as a phenomenon independently of what type of sharing it is, I think we will be able to better understand what steps need to be taken to foster OER sharing and to eliminate barriers.
Is there anything else you'd like to add?
If we need to look at the question of openness from a global perspective, long term, we need to consider things like having media groups, big corporations, and big companies involved in sharing knowledge and resources produced by universities.
Our institution, the University of Leeds, is committed to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and other institutions across the world have a similar commitment. For us to achieve these goals, we need more education, we need greater presence of educational materials, educational contributions, and research within our society. If we want to tackle these goals, we need that knowledge and that education to be open. If it is not open, we will fail.
In my future work as an academic, I’m interested in finding the relationship between the work of Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist — one of the most influential thinkers of the last 50 years — and attitudes towards digital engagement, and in particular attitudes towards sharing. I think that there can be solid scientific explanations to some of the conundrums that we deal with in education and in Higher Education. Why are academics not sharing always? Why do we have these barriers? In Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework he presents a lot of concepts that can be explored and should be explored to find these explanations. In particular the concept of habitus. I’ve been reading recently about the influence of habitus in the actual dispositions of German teachers when it comes to digital learning engagement. And also another study from the Maldives University in the Maldives, in which the cultural habitus, the educational habitus, and the technological habitus of the teachers is taken into account to predict or understand the social significance of their teaching style and tools. So I think it’s a valid theoretical framework to explore the phenomenon of sharing.
If we need to look at the question of openness from a global perspective, long term, we need to consider things like having media groups, big corporations, and big companies involved in sharing knowledge and resources produced by universities. We need to look for partnerships with television or newspaper groups so that they can also be a channel of distribution to facilitate engagement with audiences of all that valuable knowledge that is being produced. That is an area that hasn’t been explored and is something that I’m very enthusiastic about. Think about this, imagine an online newspaper having a section dedicated to educational resources, topics to do with research, a sort of journalism inspired by research and educational materials. The sharing of those materials, the sharing of that open scholarship, should actually blend within the work that these media groups carry out in terms of engaging.
Copyright: Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 Licence SPARC Europe
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