Last week we finally managed to meet up for the first time. Kevin Caley @ Nottingham (of the Biodiversity consortium project)  hosted us. Each project partner gave an outline of the range of materials they were going to release and the work necessary to get them into an OER position. We have a diverse range of materials which should allow us to explore all the different release, delivery and content maintenance issues. We then had a walkthrough the workpackage plan to check our understanding of the requirements was consistent.

The requirement for a JISC style Consortium Agreement as opposed to one of our regular project contracts appears to be causing some additional delays. All parties thought that the sign-off would be a similar process and timescale to our regular contracts via ‘Letters of Agreement’ but this extra overhead has caused more delay than expected (especially holiday time).  Fortunately no partner reported they had been prevented from progressing their work while this is being sorted out.

Within our workpackages I have set aside a little time for the Project Partner to be able to explore the OER concept/community to see where their discipline materials might work most effectively. We need to be able to gather viewpoints from the practitioners point of view as the project progresses so we can tackle issues before the final release and maximise the academic talents in the group . I am sure they will have concerns about the sustainability of OER - it needs effective reward and recognition for the individual and their HEI otherwise their financial audit will see OER production as ‘an opportunity for cost saving’; its an expensive pursuit unless you recover more than you contribute. This will require skilled practitioners to be capable of adopting other resources quickly into their own delivery framework; it appears many e-learning academics find it far easier to produce their own resources consistently than mix and match someone elses as it may take longer to discover, evaluate and select someone elses OER than it would to write your own. Does writing your own win because it develops a new skill every time?

The DJ analogy is that the art of the blend is just as important as the raw material - someone has to bring OER together at the point of delivery and this will probably be yet another burden on the academic talent pool unless it receives a little space to explore the problems. Our first meeting looked at the likely mixing deck for this - JorumOpen and the ReLoad editor, but other solutions may be possible.

The recent start-up meeting gave all the project managers plenty of information to condense but in amongst this was a slight concern about the repository in the middle. JorumOpen is to be the vehicle for OER resources (and our projects are to shake down the problem areas as a sort of technical “crash-dummy”, not a pedagogical one) and we would obviously like to start a core bioscience community through our OER contributions. Jorum have quickly provided an upload service for JorumOpen but without some way of finding what has been uploaded we do not know if we have made the best of it - it’s like throwing it down a well and hearing no splash. Anyway, this has now been resolved - we are to get access to a test service from September. Bioscience is volunteering our project materials as samples (those that are already prepared for OER release)

Other matters from the startup (see http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/oer/startupmeeting090609.aspx) I took home were;

1. The overall project goals - “To discover the issues” - needs to have a deliverable to the community, not just a social and technical challenge. I thought JISC left the subject centres with a fair amount of closure work to do as the final products have to be really useful to our community, not theoretically so. The seed has to be able to germinate.
2. The legal issues really need to be documented explicitly. Although many institutions will have no problem releasing small amounts on an semi-formal basis, winding this up to industrial scale would need a clear policy on OER. These projects should start the host institutions really thinking about the process. JISC legal are preparing materials and an OER toolkit may appear.
3. The Open University is making a better job of it than MIT in my opinion, even though MIT started OpenCourseware: http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/ . I also hear they have secured considerable further funding since.
4. The gain is not just publicity for the host institution and academic but for the discipline itself. It needs a realistic framework to get contributions re-used and enhanced. However, protecting IPR looks complex. I see we now have a Minister for Higher Education and IP[Rights] so these are being linked at the highest level.
5. CETIS is still the best technical reference site (thanks Phil) and key developers write influential papers and blogs there. It needs to be bridged through to the disciplines collectively and this is where subject centres are essential translators. If we could get our community blogging then we would have better evidence to influence developments.
6. We did not get to hear enough about the other strands - the separate sessions lost an opportunity, although ours did raise some key priorities for our management.
7. Keep an eye on Cloudworks OER ‘clouds’ for discussions and ideas. e.g. http://cloudworks.open.ac.uk/node/1846
8. The Evaluation and Synthesis project will be working with the OER projects to discover more about practices and cultures within subjects, links between open curricula and open content and, finally, collective practices of content creation. I wrote a report about Bioscience habits called ‘Approaches to e-Learning in the Biosciences’ for our centre a few years ago to discover more about this as part of our DeL work. I don’t think my conclusions were too far off, although I have learned far more since.

Final plans and budgets have been returned to the Academy and I think we are now up and running. Looking forward to meeting our project partners towards the end of the month and discussing logistics. I have recieved a better breakdown of the content manifest from most as we will have to assess the volume of material in terms of its individual values as well as the sum of the parts. This is complicated.