Open, Share, Learn: The University of Michigan's Open Educational Resources

Editor's Notes

• #2: How many of you have heard about Open.Michigan? About creative commons? About open access?
• #3: Open.Michigan has published over 70 course-based resources online.We've worked with over 40 faculty members and 70 volunteers, mostly students, to create resources from the U-M that can be shared and adapted across the world.We have published over 25 resources that contribute to teaching and learning, including image collections, videos, web tutorials, open textbooks and handbooks, quizzes and student work. 
• #4: http://www.flickr.com/photos/openmichigan/5716745792/in/set-72157626712644310Our resources have been viewed and downloaded thousands of times from over 127 countries, as our published content grows, so do our users. Members from 12 schools from across the University have worked with us to publish projects, research, teaching materials and resources online.
• #5: While we publish materials, resources and tools that can be shared, adapted and used by anyone on the web, we're not simply a publishing house.We're interested in fostering transparency and a culture of sharing that starts with U-M and grows to include the entire global learning community.Open.Michigan was founded on the principle that our public university has a responsibility to share the knowledge it produces with others.Transparency builds reputation and accountability and sharing openly contributes to both these factors that are priorities for academic institutions of high quality. We are also founded on the principle that knowledge should be spread across the globe and that, as our digital era advances, knowledge is becoming a public good. While you still need to enroll in school, attend classes, and apply yourself to get a quality education from U-M, these factors don't mean that we can't share what we teach in our classrooms and share what we create in our labs and in our communities of practice across disciplines. 
• #6: Sharing, learning and creativity often go hand in hand: interpretation is unique. Standing on the shoulders of giants:"One who develops future intellectual pursuits by understanding the research and works created by notable thinkers of the past”Made famous by Isaac Newtonhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants
• #7: But there’s only one not-so-secret formula that I know: “Do good work and put it where people can see it.”It’s a two step process.Step one, “do good work,” is incredibly hard. There are no shortcuts. Make stuff every day. Fail. Get better.Step two, “put it where people can see it,” was really hard up until about 10 years ago. Now, it’s very simple: “put your stuff on the internet.”
• #9: OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools,materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge. Atkins, Brown, Hammond. A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges and New Opportunities. 2007Growing movement of open sharing, transparency and resource development that address facets of these new opportunities and networks of knowledge.Focus today on what we call Open Educational Resources: materials developed in a teaching setting that are licensed so that others may use and adapt them to suit their needs.Open Access is a larger movement: information is freely available (open access journals, etc.) but not always licensed to use by others.Open Educational resources are all sorts of materials that are licensed for use downsteam
• #10: How did we start and where are we going? We were piloted in 2007 with funding from the Dean of the Medical School, Dean Woolliscroft. With a small team of graduate students and a faculty member from the School of Information, the first pilot proved to be successful.
• #11: open.umich.edu/education/medhttp://www.kellogg.umich.edu/theeyeshaveit/index.htmlDean Woolliscroft saw the potential for openly licensed learning resources to be used across the world in different settings, in order to fill the much needed gap between teachers and resources and their goal of successfully preparing new doctors to be able to save lives, both in Michigan and in Ghana.We were charged with publishing the first two years of Medical School at U-M, the M1 and M2 sequences, as open educational resources. We've now published or are about to publish 50% of this content and have worked with sequence directors across the disciplines of medicine. 
• #12: Need: to produce OER at little cost to the University of Michigan: large and distributed campusUniversity of Michigan:#58,089 enrolled students (Fall 2009)41,674 at Ann Arbor campus                        8,389 instructional staff including teaching assistantsSolution: Digital and Distributed Scribes, launched in 2007Mostly student volunteers are recruited by or approach Open.Michigan with an interest in learning about copyright and working with content to publish as OER.Connecting with students in a variety of ways based on their interest, discipline and skills.Often students will pair with a faculty in their department whose class they are enrolled in to publish this material as OER.Sinceits inception, members of the Open.Michigan team wanted to facilitate participatory learning and create a model for publishing OER that could be scaled across schools and disciplines. Our first challenge was to find a way to develop and publish content.Our dScribe process aims to do just this: it is a distributed, usually voluntary process for clearing content and preparing it to be published under open, adaptable licenses. This process offers faculty and others the opportunity to publish content they've already created under open licenses. To facilitate this process we developed OERca, a content clearance tool that automates some of this process, making it faster and more efficient to clear existing content and prepare it for open publication. We have also created guides about making informed copyright decisions. 
• #13: dScribe workflow chart with all the steps.Training:2 hours, 7 steps (include copyright/IP training, assessment and clearance of materials and publication)Pre-AssessmentIntro to copyright, intellectual property issuesdScribe workflowOERca trainingAll training materials posted on Open.Michigan’s wiki to be used and adaptedOpen.Michigan staff developing a series of short screencasts to facilitate this training
• #14: Worked with a Legal and Policy team made up of law school faculty, general counsel and copyright specialists to make sure this process is legal and to provide resources and support for people working through this process. Our work needed to match with the legal culture and framework at U-M and we needed to make sure we were developing legally sound processes and workflows. Resources and Tools:RAD Tree (Recommended Action and Decision) tree: workflow to help make decisions about certain objects embedded in the content being cleared for OER publication.Casebook: examples of different types of information and expression (images, charts, text, etc.) with explanation of copyright status and how it can or cannot be used in OER and the legal cases that support these decisions.
• #15: OERca: software tool that anyone can gain access to that allows for content to be uploaded and assembled in such a way that objects needing copyright analysis can be assessed and edited in a steamlined manner; also automates the reassembly of the content after assessment and editing to prepare it for OER production
• #16: Today we've worked with faculty, staff and students and one visiting scholar and trained them on this process. The casebook is being translated and localized to suit Peruvian law. This model has been adopted by universities in the U.S. and across the world, including: Global dScribes:Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (Ghana)University of Cape Town (South Africa)Pontifical Catholic University of PeruUniversity of California at BerkleyJoin our discussion:http://groups.google.com/group/oer-dScribe
• #17: We're still focusing on trying to make it easy for those at U-M and elsewhere to publish OER and incorporate these considerations more broadly into their own workflow experiences. We've recently developed and launched our new Drupal publishing platform, OERbit, that others can use to publish OER/OCW.Together with Switchback The platform was designed with OER/OCW in mind and is built on the Drupal CMS. OERbit provides a basic set of functionality for OER/OCW publishers, including course and resource-based navigation, flexible content hierarchies, Creative Commons license integration, and RSS distribution, as well as RDFa output. The code is open source and available for download and distribution on GitHub.
• #18: As we've grown over the last three years, however, we're increasingly focusing on fostering sharing across disciplines and departments on our own campus. We are not solely focusing our efforts on production and retrospective clearing of content but focusing more on facilitation projects in progress and teaching others how to make their work open from the start. We conduct training sessions. workshops and also consult groups and individuals across campus. So how did we get to where we are, really? I'll spend some time discussing our processes and hopefully giving you useful concrete information you can use to start your own OER projects on your campus and facilitate open activities. 
• #19: As stated before, we're interested in encouraging a culture of sharing at U-M and making it easy for people to share across institutions and learning settings in legal and useful ways. We've started to facilitate sharing projects across the University:Student Handbook for Global EngagementMERLOT partnershipsOpen Textbook engagement and facilitationNot so focused on publishing as much content as possible but to integrate our work with the academic culture at U-M.
• #20: We've been assessing our own impact at U-M and learning that people are doing these things already--they're just not talking about it in terms of "open educational resources" but they're interested in sharing with their social and professional networks. We can facilitate these practices and teach others about the benefits and uses of open licenses (translation, localization, bridge materials, addressing gaps in teacher-student ratios and resource scarcity, eg. $$) through education, through community building and by building tools and resources. https://open.umich.edu/wiki/Evaluation_Metrics_Project
• #21: Vision document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ck4147ptFk5_hjtUbEJ8_RnnvPTII1WoYj0PfKWuCh4/edit?hl=en&authkey=CN3y5tYM#
• #22: Open.Michigan needs to expand its capacity for one-on-one guidance and training for creators of OERs on campus, in addition to providing do-it-yourself resources for faculty, students, and staff who want to independently create and use OERs. Beyond guidance, OER creators need advanced platforms that facilitate collaborative content building and sharing.As more of the U-M and external academic community become aware of and use Open.Michigan OERs, the initiative has seen an increased demand for more and richer content from all U-M academic disciplines. In addition to the text resources it offers, Open.Michigan will seek more audiovisual content to share as OERs. As Open.Michigan develops a foundational collection of OERs, it should add value to the content and explore unique and engaging ways to build on that material. Open.Michigan collects and reviews a variety of quantitative data and qualitative data on the use of its website and materials and should share this with the OER creators and end-users of all our services.
• #23: To this end we're re-examining our original dScribe process and envisioning wider ways for students and others to participate in facilitating open practices on our campus, not just through publishing support but through advocacy, engagement and teaching others. We'll be working on an incentives structure that reflects these opportunities over the course of this summer: https://open.umich.edu/wiki/Badges
• #24: temoa.infooercommons.orgocwconsortium.orgocw.mit.eduocw.tufts.eduoerafrica.orgLots of universities and institutions involved across the world, other examples: Johns Hopkins, Unis in Japan, China, Open University, University of Nottingham10 years of content creation and collaboration with the OpenCourseWare ConsortiumOver 5,000 courses in OCWCOver 26,000 course related materials on OER CommonsCollections across the world, including Mexicohttp://www.arl.org/sparc/http://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htmWithin academia there are also other movements that support resource sharing and transparency. SPARC Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition: supports libraries and universities: invest in open publishing practices, is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system. MERLOT national consortia of Universities and colleges, creation, collection and organizationThese are available to faculty to use in their own teaching contexts but not always openly licensed to be adaptable outside of specific contexts.28,000 materials; pedagogically created Learning Objects that feature rich media and interactive elements to teach students about certain subjects and skills.
• #25: tips for creating OER and the general process: choose your license for your overall work; use open content; cite your sources;
• #26: Open Attribute is a suite of tools that makes it ridiculously simple for anyone to copy and paste the correct attribution for any CC licensed work.A simple tool everyone can use to do the right thing with the click of a button.OERGlue: a new tool (in beta) that allows you to take content from the web, stitch it together and add interactivity and assessment tools to build your own courses. OERbit is a Drupal-based publishing platform to share publicly licensed learning resources (OER/OCW) with the world.ccMixter is a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want.
• #27: “Share your ideas” by britbohlinger CC: BY-NC http://www.flickr.com/photos/britbohlinger/4223755982/in/photostream/