MEDEV

School of Medical Sciences Education Development

First of all I want to say thank you for such a stimulating exchange on Twitter a couple of days ago with OER and repository colleagues, this post is partly based on that exchange and they deserve publicly thanking: David Kernohan (@dkernohan), Pat Lockley (@patlockley), John Robertson (@kavubob) and Nick Sheppard (@mrnick).

Our short conversation reminded me of something I have been thinking about for a while in relation to people finding and using OERs, and balancing a desire for simplicity of access from academics with the 'need' to brand and market repositories.

Here are some meanderings in relation to both that Twitter exchange and also following on from a meeting I had yesterday with the Dynamic Learning Maps team here at Newcastle’s School of Medical Education Development, where the Subject Centre is based. I love having the opportunity to work with my colleagues there (and in other UK medical schools) on real implementations of open educational resources in context. The ways we were talking about presenting OERs linked up with thoughts on branding and questions of repositories pulling people to them vs pushing content out from them in meaningful ways which have been preoccupying me of late.

So, firstly, I am going to describe the DLMs meeting I had yesterday and how we are thinking of embedding OER metadata about available openly licensed content through a resource discovery layer in a dynamic learning maps implementation of the MBBS curriculum here at Newcastle.

Then I will move on to why branding of repositories in this particular context seems increasingly unimportant, and why content push is of supreme importance, linking this to the research we did in the OOER pilot phase UKOER project.

The Dynamic Learning Maps project is an innovative way of structuring curriculum data enabling multiple views on such data, customised to an individual’s context, in a way that is most meaningful to them. For example how a student would want to view a curriculum will be different to a teacher, and different again to administrators and support staff needs. It was funded through the recent JISC Curriculum Design and Delivery programme, which ends very soon.

Within the DLM environment it is fairly easy to add individual resources to any node describing a particular granular part of the curriculum. I should probably explain (to colleagues from other disciplines) that in medicine (and in dentistry and veterinary medicine too) the curriculum is typically mapped to a set of terminal outcomes as prescribed by the regulatory bodies (GMC, GDC, RCVS) who licence students for practice, post-qualification, and who quality assure the curriculum of each medical, dental or vet school, as well as setting policy. Schools map their curriculum against these outcomes and others to ensure they are covering everything the regulators require, and that every qualifying student is fit to practice as a doctor, dentist or veterinary professional. Newcastle, like many other medical schools uses a way of structuring its curriculum detailed by The Scottish Doctors which ensures that every learning episode can be linked to a terminal curriculum outcome, with competencies and learning objectives laid out in great detail.

Although a huge amount of work, mapping the curriculum in this much detail is a very enabling process. Nick Ross at Birmingham, Jean McKendree at HYMS, and others, have done stirling work in this area, which schools like Newcastle have benefitted from. Ash Self and the team at Sheffield have had recognition from the GMC in the past for how they have successfully mapped and structured their curriculum which lays out exactly why every learning interaction is important, and how it fits in with meeting terminal outcomes and required competencies.

So, we have a very granular way of structuring the curriculum for delivery in an online environment, which means that we can attach resources to each of these tiny learning interactions or episodes with a massive amount of situated highly contextualised meaning.

We at MEDEV have been working in the area of OERs for some time now, and the DLMs team asked if I would spend some time with them as they explored adding resources pulled from outside the confines of required reading and lecture notes to enrich the curriculum, and pull in external relevant content.

What a gift – to have the opportunity to talk about embedding openly licenced content in a way where it is delivered seamlessly, at the right time to the right students and staff, without them having to go and look for it themselves, would seem to me to give those resources the best ever opportunity for attention.

The team is now working on using APIs from places like Xpert (and hopefully Jorum soon) to push resources to lecturers and students. In terms of getting to those staff who have never thought about looking for open content this seems an excellent strategy to me.

So, if we accept, that the only people (in the first instance) who are ever going to actually go and visit a repository or referatory are in the minority of early adopters, and that pulling new users who aren’t so eager to explore openly licenced materials is difficult to impossible, then spending much time on that minority of users (who would come anyway because that’s their thing) seems churlish, at the expense of working with the developers employed to support curriculum delivery, who can get your message to the right people, at the right time, and do your work for you….

This leads me on to branding. If pulling people to your website/repository/referatory is your priority, then having an identity that is recognisable which could inspire brand loyalty may be important to you. However, the resource discovery research done by Dr David Davies (of the University of Warwick) as part of our OOER pilot phase UKOER project, suggests that this is confusing, and that, actually, users are more concerned by the provenance of the resource itself (author, institution) and its relevance to their own teaching than anything else (See the final report for the full research).

• They also want to find it on Google.
• They don’t want to have to visit several websites to see if there are resources relevant to them.
• They want a one stop shop which cross searches all of those sources of material, and presents them with a list of links they can check out in a few seconds, preferably in relation to the very context in which they are thinking of using those resources.

If we accept, then, that even the keanie beanies prefer to search Google for openly licenced content, then the front end web presence of repositories/referatories becomes even less important, whereas good search engine optimisation and easy ways to re-present the data in localised contexts seem much more important.

When searches do yield meaningful results, users state that where it comes from is irrelevant. They want the author and institution details, and a bit about the resource, then they want to give it a quick once over to see if it’s fit for purpose.

Which brings me to another question – why is there so much importance on logos, brands and acronyms for referatories and repositories? I think this is distracting from the real business of getting material out there, so that is it stumbled upon at every turn by students and lecturers.

My personal opinion is that there are lots of answers to the branding question including (but not limited to):

• Funder requirements – projects are usually required to have a web presence, and often must report on web stats and downloads as part of their success criteria
• Repository profile – the need for people to deposit their ‘stuff’ somewhere – why X is better than Y for that purpose
• Questions of quality and trust – brand loyalty – putting your stuff in esteemed places would seem to be a good thing to do to get quality by association
• Confusion of form with function – how something looks and extraneous services around base functionality are distracting and confusing. Get the functionality right and let other people build around what you provide.

Unfortunately our resource discovery work didn’t look at where people would deposit resources, so I’m not talking about that in this post. But it may be something we look at in our evaluation work in PORSCHE and ACTOR.

To my mind, funders are starting to move to different metrics for measuring the success of a project (and to date there are still no funded repository or referatory services in UK HE, they are all still project funded), and I think that the advent and uptake of easy to use web 2.0 services is making us more creative at thinking of, and presenting, alternative metrics for success, but I still think there is a lot of work to be done here, not only with funders but within HEIs and staff too.

It’s only when we get to a point of embracing this kind of creativity and of working with other teams and people doing complimentary work, rather than competing against them, will we get to a place where more joined up thinking happens, and where the technology becomes truly transparent or invisible and ceases to be the perceived barrier it currently is to the uptake of openly licenced content with the next layer of potential users.

Note: The DLM website currently only has a basic demonstrator, but keep your eyes open here, because as soon as the next bit of work is done, it will be opened up for all to see.

Sorry if that rambles. I just wanted to get my thoughts down. Comments really, really welcome :)