Creating environment for sharing educational and research resources

CREATING ENVIRONMENT FOR SHARING EDUCATIONAL AND RESEARCH RESOURCES

PROF. V.VENKAIAH VICE-CHANCELLOR

KRISHNA UNIVERSITY

[email protected]

Presentation Focus

Changing university’s research and teaching roles

Emerging trends in OERs and OA Role of International Development

Agencies Addressing the issue of creating an

enabling environment and policies for development and sharing of quality educational and research resources.

Components of Scholarliness

Discovery (Research in specific discipline) Integration (Making connections across

disciplines) Application (Service activities) Teaching (Highest level of scholarly

activity)

Boyer : 1990

Why policies are important? Policies are important as they serve as guide, and

assist the senior management to adopt fair and logical procedures to administer and distribute funds.

Policies define general perspective - when the policy

is applicable, who are covered by the policy, what actions are encouraged within the policy, how the policy is administered, etc.

Why policies are important? Policies are predetermined course of action

established to guide the organizational actions towards achievement of its short-term and long-term objectives

They have a direct link to the vision and mission of the organization

OER and OA

Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Access (OA) to scientific information.

OER and OA are two sides of the same higher education ecosystem, and are essential to improve the quality of teaching and research.

OER - OpenCourseWare

“The term Open Educational Resources (OER) refer to the open provision of educational resources, enabled by information and communication technologies, for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for non-commercial purposes”.

UNESCO meeting in 2002

“The Open Courseware concept is based on the philosophical view of knowledge as a collective social product and so it is also desirable to make it a social property” V. S. Prasad (2002)

OERs – Some Views

OERs are teaching, learning and research resources that reside in public domain that permits their free use or customization by others (Bissell, A: 2007).

OERs are sharable assets. (Smith and Casserly: 2006)

They represent the efforts of a worldwide community, empowered by the internet, to help equalize the access to knowledge and educational opportunities.

OpenCourseWare MovementWorldwide

MIT OCW

UNESCO’s Initiative

COL’s Initiative

s

UKOU Experience

of OER

Other Institutional Initiatives

OER Users

UNESCO Recommendations to Govts.

Promote awareness and use of OER Bridge digital divide by developing infrastructure Develop national policy for OER Promote use of Open licensing frameworks Support capacity building initiatives on OER Encourage and support research on OER Adopt open standards and technologies for

interoperability Encourage open licence for materials produced

using public funds

UNESCO Recommendations to Institutions

Promote awareness and use of OER Improve media and information literacy Develop institutional policies for OER Educate stakeholders on open licenses and

copyright Promote quality assurance and peer review of OER Develop strategic partnerships to avoid duplication

of work as well as technologies Encourage and support research on OER Develop tools to facilitate access to OER

UNESCO Recommendations to Teachers

Promote awareness and use of OER Develop and use OER Engage in peer review of OER Promote quality of OER Develop OER in local languages Contextualize OER Conduct research on OER Share learning materials prepared

OER Africa recommends institutional policy for OER

Does institutional policy provide clarity on IPR and copyright on works created during the course of employment?

Does HR policy provide guidance regarding whether or not the creation of certain kinds of work – e. g. learning resources – constitutes part of the job description of staff?

OER Africa recommends institutional policy for OER

Does the institution have ICT policy regarding access to and use of appropriate software, hardware, the internet and technical support?

Does the institution have materials development and Quality Assurance (QA) policy guidelines to ensure appropriate selection, development, QA and copyright clearance of works that may be shared?

Research Publications

ISSN registered a total of 15,55,307 titles till 2010, and the corresponding number for 2002 was 10,72,023

Price (1963) estimated the growth rate as 4.7% with a doubling time of 15 years.

Larsen and von Ins (2010) after analysing the growth of scientific publications from 1907 to 2007 concluded that the growth rate of science is lower than 4.7% in established disciplines

Research Publications

There are about 24,000 peer-reviewed journals. There are 1,14,866 journals recorded in Ulrich’s International

Periodical Directory (UIPD - 2012), of which 27,432 are peer-reviewed, scholarly, active and primary journals. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) reports over 7459 open access journals in January 2012

About 13,50,000 articles were published in peer-reviewed journals in 2006; Jinha (2010) estimated that nearly 50 million articles were published by 2008.

Björk et al (2008)

Open Access Movement

OA as a movement started at a meeting in 2001 organized by the Open Society Institute in Budapest, which later came to be known as Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI).

Open Access

“free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited” (BOAI, 2002).

Freedoms of Educational Resources

Freedom to use for any purpose Freedom to use and expand Freedom to build on and extend Freedom to educators to use and modify

learning materials to ensure personalized and effective use.

Benefits of OA

Increased access to current scientific research for researchers and scientists

Global dissemination of research and scholarship of individual researchers and Institutions

Improvement in the impact of research Institutions and scholars to be cited more Higher Return on Investment (ROI) of research

grants as research results are publicly and freely accessible

Considerations for OA Policies

Policies should mandate deposit of research papers by

scholars in institutional repositories All types of research content should be considered such as

published paper, conference proceedings, project reports, theses and dissertations

While free access is necessary, institutions also promote open license (as in OER)

Considerations for OA Policies

While the policy may recommend publication in OA journals, immediate deposit in institutional and/or subject repository of online access be mandated;

Institutions may consider Article Processing Charged (APC) in OA journals as legitimate research cost, and may also create central fund as part of the policy;

The policy should also cover compliance issue as deposit is the responsibility of the researchers.

Swan (2012)

Need for and Viability of Educational Resource Sharing

Increasing social demands on quality educational resources

Inadequate available educators and conventional libraries.

Advances in information technology Creation and conversion of many learning

materials and academic journals into digital objects

Need for and Viability of Educational Resource Sharing

Rapid growth of Internet infrastructure Transformation of conventional libraries and

learning to the digital libraries and e-learning Accessing information and learning from

anywhere at any time. Emergence of educational resource sharing

as a viable means to improve the quality of and access to education.

Benefits of Educational Resources

Reduced costs Personalized learning Interoperability Customization Localization Creation of a vibrant forum similar to the

Internet as a means of sharing and accessing the resources of other educators.

Why should we share our educational Resources?

An alternative approach is necessary since the current environment is moving to tighter copyright restriction

Digital resource sharing doesn't add costs An alternative to copyrighted, for-profit

education. Need to preserve and promote public

education

Why should we share our educational Resources? …..

Promoting the digital resource economy One person/institution cannot do alone;

Team approach required Communities of practice (communities

can foster improved excellence and quality)

What can we do?

Organize awareness programs regarding the potential and utility of Open Educational Resources

Join the movement of creating and sharing the educational resources

Involve in work groups, post news, discuss and exchange

Form a community of practice based on open content creation and sharing.

What can we do?

Release our educational resources under a creative commons license

Encourage our institutions to adopt the creative commons license

Advocate for formation of a Consortium for Open Educational Resources at National level and become active members.

To Conclude ….

“you can dream, create,

design and make the most

wonderful things

in the world.

But you need people

to make

your dream a reality”

Walt Disney

THANK YOU

[email protected]