“OER fits with universities’ missions as civic institutions by extending access to education”
Name: Melissa Highton
Position: Director of Learning, Teaching and Web Services; Assistant Principal Online Learning
Expertise: Open educational resources, practice, policy and pedagogy
Institution: University of Edinburgh
Country: UK
More info: Home Page Twitter Video
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9486-3752
An interview with Melissa Highton on 2 September 2021
Can you tell us a bit about your work with Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Pedagogy more broadly at the University of Edinburgh? How did you become involved to begin with, and were there any librarians that supported you on your journey?
Yes, I’m not a librarian, but I’m library-adjacent, because I think that learning technologists and librarians need to work closely together because we are all in the same business when it comes to learning resources. Learning technologists tend to work with user-created resources — resources that are created by the teachers or by the learners — and they think about how those can be made open. Librarians tend to work with published resources or university collections and archives, and think about how those can be made open. We have in common a shared interest in the licensing and knowing where the material came from and whether there’s third-party copyright in there, as well as all the different aspects of copyright.
I’ve been involved with OER at University of Leeds, University of Oxford, and University of Edinburgh. Each of these institutions take the position that OER is about making materials available to other people to use, but also understanding licensing and reuse of teaching materials generally.
Who has benefited from Open Education (OE) at your institution, as well as beyond your institution? What would you say are the key benefits of OER?
Open Educational Resources fits with universities’ missions as civic institutions that have a mission or values around extending access to education. Where there are institutions who are resource rich with many teaching materials, that’s part of what a university is all about: to think about how we can share that with other teachers and how we can share it in different formats and with licenses that say it’s okay to be reused and adapted.
I think that everyone in the university benefits from having OER activity in the institution, even if they’re not quite doing it themselves. There’s a heightened understanding around copyright and reuse, and we create teaching materials for courses using other people’s materials, but also teachers produce their own materials and share those with their own students — hopefully more widely as well.
Open Educational Resources fits with universities’ missions as civic institutions that have a mission or values around extending access to education. Where there are institutions who are resource rich with many teaching materials, that’s part of what a university is all about: to think about how we can share that with other teachers and how we can share it in different formats and with licenses that say it’s okay to be reused and adapted.
Licenses that allow reuse and adaptation are really key for education because teachers like to adapt their materials to their particular teaching context and sometimes it’s quite hard to reuse other people’s materials. So OER allows that adaptation and reuse.
So partly we’re sharing our resources with anybody who might want to use them, and partly it benefits the institution in that we can use our materials and reuse them within the institution. If we need to move the materials from one format to another, or from one platform to another, having a clear understanding about the copyright, who made the materials, and all the copyrights that are involved in them, means that we can be agile in terms of moving material from one platform to another. And that was partly what I was speaking about at the Apereo conference, about how University of Edinburgh was able to be more resilient during COVID because we had that greater understanding about our teaching materials, where they were kept, where we could put them, and how we could use them online.
What do you see as key successes of the OE movement so far, starting from your own experience?
I think the big successes have been partly to do with sharing materials from places where they are created to where they can be used. So for instance, the University of Edinburgh shares a lot of materials directly with Scottish schools. We then map those materials against the curriculum for schools and we are able to share those with teachers to benefit anybody who’s teaching in Scotland because we understand the curriculum there and that reuse process.
In addition, I think that one of the big achievements of the movement has been to have OER so clearly cited as part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Open Educational Resources is mentioned specifically as something that is important for all aspects of equality and inclusion in the world, and that access to education for all is one of the UN Sustainability Goals. That fits very well with the mission and vision of so many universities that are aligning themselves with the UN SDGs.
What still needs to be done for Open Education to truly take hold? What are still the most pressing challenges that you see?
I think there are many institutions who haven’t perhaps invested as much as they should in supporting colleagues to make these choices to create OER and to share them. But I think that the institutions that are doing that, where there’s an OER support service, where there’s policy in place, the institutions are seeing real benefits, and they are able to map that against their university missions and values. So I think that we will see more institutions taking a public position and being proud of their OER now. That will be, I think, a big coming of age for Open Educational Resources.
What are your plans, and your institutions’ for the future with Open Education?
My plan is to continue to ensure that the University of Edinburgh is leading in this area. I want to maintain our position as one of the largest providers of Open Educational Resources, certainly in UK Higher Education, and as well as being a producer of Open Educational Resources. I’m also increasingly feeling that we need to get more out of our opportunities to consume OER from other places. The more that we can diversify our curriculum and use teaching materials from other parts of the world, the richer the education will be that we offer the students at the University of Edinburgh.
I think that one of the big challenges for Higher Education is those silos — people aren’t very good at reusing other people’s materials. The University of Edinburgh has such an internationally diverse student group, and we teach so many different courses, so we have a huge curriculum at the University of Edinburgh. I think that open practice and welcoming in materials from other places really is part of the enrichment that we can bring for our students.
Copyright: Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 Licence SPARC Europe
To more champions >
Comments are closed.