Exploring collaborative use and re-use of OER rich media resources in art and design

Chris Follows

In recent years, Open Educational Resources (OER) have gained significant reach globally as a means of facilitating free and open access to educational materials. However, most of the empirical research on the adoption of OER in higher education is conducted in the US, while Europe and other countries, including Greece, fall behind. To that end, this research focused on the awareness and use of OER by higher education students and educators within the Graphic Arts discipline in Greece, to provide evidence regarding the adoption of OER to university administrations and libraries and encouraging their use across campus. The findings suggest that awareness is low, especially among undergraduate students, despite the fact that educators are aware of OER and already share their work as such. This paradox is probably related to students’ vague knowledge of what OER are and how to use them for learning. Therefore, actions are required from educators, university administration and librarians to inform students of the benefits of OER adoption in the educational process as well as to communicate educators’ OER efforts to students. Moreover, participants identified as the biggest obstacle for adopting OER in Graphic Arts the lack of a portal that accommodates OER for this discipline, which lays the groundwork for further research. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution. This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in Media Education

Lack of literacy has existed as a health problem in education for many years, paticulary in Indonesia. Literacy on art and discuss art education still has less of number. Learning resources become one of the main factors in learning of arts. This studi usually only emphasizes on practicebased learning without considering the cognitive aspects of knowledge that are also very important building a chacacter of student. Open Educational Resources (OER) is a learning resource that helps reduce literacy issues, the sustainability of resources and freely access-online learning resources, used by teachers and students, and the most important of context above were empowerment processes. As a source of digital learning, OER, not just cencerned to applications, websites, but the quality of the learning process that determines success in learning. University of Lampung has just begin to develop e-learning for entire aspect of academic events. In the context of OER, they has Learning Management System (LMS) builded by own, named ‘virtual class’. As a learning system of course it favor to the learning outcomes, but in the role of learning-teaching lacking affect to the student in searching some new informations. OER teach student for solving the course problem as well as teacher indeed. Since it shown up, there so many online-institute made to provide content, new jobs eg. Saylor.org, edX, P2PU, Khan Academy, Open Yale Course etc. This article aims to share experience from a spesific course of dance education technologybased in Unila; a new studi in art-study program in the assumption of new experiences. Keywords: OER, LMS, virtual class, empowerment processes

This article explores the implementation of Connected Art Practice in diverse learning environments, serving as an immersive entry point for students and researchers to develop collaborative transdisciplinary skills. This innovative approach integrates audio, educational, and sustainability research, employing sound-interaction methods applied to tangible objects. Participants engage in exploring the interplay between objects representing interests or values, fostering the creation of a visual and linguistic network of interconnectedness. Inspired by artistic research, particularly Dérive, the practice provides experiences of connectedness to others and the environment, intertwined with reflections and discussions that foster a community of inquiry. This community collaboratively designs shared practices or projects, encouraging a holistic approach to transformative learning, addressing heterogeneity, complexity, authenticity, critical awareness, and emotional connectedness. All three case studies utilized qualitative analysis in artistic and academic settings. Datasets were collected in case study two from group discussion, participant observation, press releases and documentary photographs. In case studies one and three, audio–visual recordings, participant observation, field notes, and photo-documentation were collected. This study demonstrates that “Connected Art Practice” enhances competences in artistic expression, communication, and collaboration across disciplinary, social, and cultural boundaries. Specifically, it contributes to creative reinvention, personal sharing, self-reflection, and the capacity to co-design diverse projects. The paper concludes by discussing findings and pointing out the essential qualities of Connected Art, providing insights and resources for educational and research institutions seeking to foster transdisciplinary engagement and transformative learning in their curricular activities. This article belongs to the Special Issue Visual Arts and Design: Practice-Based Research (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/societies/special_issues/430HEKJW7E)

SCORE Fellowship Final Report By Chris Follows, University of the Arts, London Exploring collaborative use and re-use of OER rich media resources in art and design Chris’ project ran from 1st July 2011 until 1st June 2012, the aims of the SCORE Fellowship Project were to explore relationships between traditional arts practice and OER practice: Support and encourage the use and reuse of OER practices using rich media content. Investigate and evaluate the most effective and efficient ways of utilising OER in arts HEIs by identifying best processes and practices for creating learning resources/objects to support the learning and teaching. Observe and contrast current practice in the OER community. Examine the effectiveness of inter-college and HEI collaborations. Develop an Arts-UKOER ‘Remix and Redistribute’ community of practice. Keywords OER, Arts, University of the Arts London, process.arts, ALTO, Digital literacies, OEP, Open educational resources, Drupal, Creative Commons, open educational resources, SCORE, Open online practice Activities The aims of the SCORE fellowship project were to gain insight and overview of the current OEP culture at UAL and across the art & design sector and then to develop understanding and resources to support future OEP within this sector from multiple perspectives including institutional, local and national. Feedback and stories through ‘doing’ open online practice The key tool used throughout the project was http://process.arts.ac.uk/. Between July 2011 and June 2012 I used process.arts as a tool to steward, support and develop open educational practice at UAL and across the wider sector through the development of subject specific content/interest communities. process.arts.ac.uk is a grass roots web2.0 open educational environment for sharing day-to-day arts practice and research of staff and students, currently provides a new ‘open learning’ space to the University of the Arts London (UAL) that straddles the institution/educational (formal learning) environment and the social (informal learning) environment. It creates an ‘experimental’ space for open educational practitioners to develop and define a new language for open edu-social practice without conforming or being influenced by pre-existing academic structures and processes. The transition of process.arts into an official UAL service will test this model and raise questions as to how institutions successfully support and develop autonomous and independent grassroots innovation without homogenising innovation. I initially developed Process.arts in 2008 with the support of UAL’s Centre for Learning and Teaching in Art and Design (CLTAD). I was awarded a secondment and fellowship to develop his ideas for creating an open educational web environment for arts staff and students to share and cluster rich media content and resources. I have continued to maintain and develop process.arts as a sustainable and independent system, through agile experimentation, small project support, voluntary support, stewardship and an open university SCORE fellowship project. Conferences, workshops, focus groups and surveys exploring practices & attitudes I gathered feedback and data through various internal institutional systems and processes, leading discussion and debates around the issues surrounding open practices at events such as the Learning studio a face-to-face self help workshop meetings, focus groups, consultations with staff and students, online surveys, social media networks and national and international conferences/events. I integrated project research into new and existing JISC Projects; throughout the project and was involved in the bid process, development, activities and collaboration with the following projects: UK OER Phase 2 – ALTO project & UK OER Phase 3 - ALTO UK DIAL project –JISC/UAL digital literacies project ‘Digital Integration into Arts Learning’ (DIAL) project. OEP PG Cert unit – JISC/UAL developing an CPDF Open Academic Practice Unit. Open online practice was measured in site/resource use/reuse, user attitudes and voluntary open activity. Data was gathered throughout the project, new tools and processes were tested and as a result and OEP resources, communities, stories and case studies were produced and published on process.arts http://process.arts.ac.uk/category/project-groups/score. The SCORE fellowship had a visible impact on the site activity, including user activity and engagement. The noticeable rise in users is significant in relation to the notion and process of forming and developing open practice. May 2011 to May 2012 Google analytics The SCORE fellowship provided the time and space to build and develop OER networks and user confidence. Users became more OER aware, visitors were spending on average spending 5 minutes at a time viewing resources and observing others ‘doing open practice’. With the general increase in views came an increase in OER awareness and a significant rise in ‘logged in users’ from 90 users in July 2011 to nearly tripling in number to 389 in June 2012. On writing this report in July 2012 process.arts is still not an official service, no one is paid to manage or support the site, this voluntary managed space with 1,400 openly licensed posts supports four thousand users a month and nearly 400 logged in users, the SCORE fellowship was the primary driver I will explain below how the fellowship has helped guarantee process.arts a sustainably future as a officially managed service at UAL. DETAIL of JISC Project and other project involvement with score including project development and support Throughout the SCORE fellowship I was involved in the bid process, development and activities of the projects below: UK OER Phase 2 – SCORE research informed the development and completion of the ALTO project - http://blogs.arts.ac.uk/alto/about/ UK OER Phase 3 - SCORE research informed the planning and development of the successful ALTO UK bid and worked in parallel and in collaboration with the project - http://blogs.arts.ac.uk/alto/alto-uk/ DIAL project – I was offered the DIAL project manager’s position in November 2011, my involvement in The UK OER and SCORE was a key aspect of my successful application for this position. UAL’s Digital Integration into Arts Learning (DIAL) project, partially funded by JISC, aims to improve graduate employability and develop confidence and capability in the adoption and integration of digitally enhanced learning for staff and students. See more on the project blog at http://dial.myblog.arts.ac.uk. SCORE has influenced the development and direction of the DIAL project, one group created and developed inline with my DIAL research is open education at UAL - http://dial.myblog.arts.ac.uk/category/open-education/ OEP PG Cert unit - The SCORE fellowship supported successful JISC proposal, CPDF Open Academic Practice Unit, to the Open Educational Resources Programme, Phase 3, PG Cert Development Strand. Supporting UAL in this development. “This project is a ‘capstone’ for UAL, building on UAL’s existing OER projects (ALTO and ALTO-UK), and UAL’s DIAL project, part of the JISC Digital Literacies programme. It will make use of the existing experience and skills of UAL staff, including those of DIAL Project Manager and OU SCORE Fellow, Chris Follows”. - http://oepractice.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2012/05/24/project-plan-for-oep-unit/ My notes for the PG Cert Open Educational practice Unit including learning outcomes - http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/unit-title-open-educational-practice OEP unit group development notes on Google docs - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1llO7yFnLS7f7ftifHFoyoraHM7wqcwQhswmp3zJNd6s/edit HEA/JISC OER Programme: Rapid innovation (FAST OER bid unsuccessful) possible future collaborations opportunities and contacts made with Open College of the Arts, BUFVC and OU as a result of research and putting this bid together. - http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/fast-oer-federated-arts-search-tool-oer-single-search-across-multiple-aggregated-sources The reason from JISC for rejection was: Low likelihood of success and limited benefits. The bid team including the UAL (lead institution), the open university and the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC) and the open college of the arts. The argument for benefits in support of pursuing the search and find solutions is answered in the small student survey we did at UAL, here's some feedback from one of the questions: Question: Which digital skill sets are important to you? Knowing where to search. Because there can be all this stuff out there but if you don’t know where to look… there should be resources to teach others how to narrow things down. Knowing where to look and how. We should be told more about resources available, more advertising done for them. Knowing how to search for information. There should be a search engine in Blackboard to make it easier to find things. Searching online for the right thing. Other projects I successfully bid and won funding to develop a new UAL Drupal free and open source web development community of practice - http://process.arts.ac.uk/category/project-groups/drupal-ual Proposal BBC/arts council The Space - expression of interest – (collaborative bid with SCORE fellow Sarah Atkinson) The video remix space. The ‘video remix space’ (VRS) explores the creative and educational potential, challenges, limitations and benefits of repurposing open online video content. (Bid unsuccessful) Support and encourage the use and reuse of OER practices using rich media content. Observe and contrast current practice in the OER community. These are two questions I answered (draft form) as part of Marta Bustillo first round of the Delphi study on institutional repositories in art colleges, or in art departments within larger institutions. The questions are deliberately open, in order to elicit a wide variety of responses. What factors contribute to the success of institutional repositories in art colleges, or in art departments within larger institutions? - http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/what-factors-contribute-successfailure-institutional-repositories-art-colleges The process of encouraging/practicing OER reuse within the arts sector was a challenge because of the lack of quantity and resource variety. There are places to access, not all OER: See useful websites links http://process.arts.ac.uk/category/discipline/research-practice/useful-websites 13 - 14 June 2011 - Oriole Really Re (Useful) Retreat, participant - Two-day event by Chris Pegler at the Open University at The Inn at Woburn - http://orioleproject.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/oriole-really-reuseful-retreat-end-of.html 20 - 21 October 2011 Warwick - Participate - SCORE Autumn Symposium Develop an Arts-UKOER ‘Remix and Redistribute’ community of practice. ONLINE channels Twitter: https://twitter.com/ProcessArtsUAL Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/process.arts.7 Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/ProcessArts?feature=watch OER Scoop.it profile - http://www.scoop.it/t/open-educational-arts-practice Outputs Support and encourage the use and reuse of OER practices and rich media content. I developed a bespoke subject specific SCORE area on process.arts to support open education in general, whilst also specializing in art and design practice based subjects, http://process.arts.ac.uk/category/project-groups/score. Additional resources were developed and clustered in specific areas across the site and the SCORE section also includes specific areas of practice such as OER, OER arts resources, SCORE dissemination, Open practice, Copyright issues, OER reuse, Useful websites and Learning video research. Over 100 OER SCORE resources were developed and made available under creative commons licenses on process.arts. Investigate and evaluate the most effective and efficient ways of utilising OER in arts HEIs by identifying best processes and practices for creating learning resources/objects to support the learning and teaching. OER over 90 resources about Open Educational Resources, majority produced through the SCORE fellowship OER arts resources OER related content specifically within the art & design practice based subjects SCORE dissemination 20 plus conference recording, lecture notes and papers of my SCORE dissemination Open practice Focus her is on open practice and communities and less on OERs Reuse 100 resources including web tools, websites, reuse stories and experiments Copyright issues A really interesting & developing batch of resources exploring, IPR, appropriation & CC licenses Learning video research a new area currently being developed and populated by new individuals and projects Observe and contrast current practice in the OER community. Publication Future learning spaces ( http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/future-learning-spaces ) SCORE contributions to this book: Part three: networked spaces: Exploring reuse of educational resource in art and design practice based learning and teaching page 156 - Chris Follows Part Four: Experimental spaces Open Spaces for arts education - the ALTO ecosystem model: Page 186 - John Casey, Wolfgang Greller, Hywel Davies, Chris Follows, Nancy Turner, Ed Webb-Ingall The book is available for download at the Aalto University bookstore, by clicking on this link and the published proceedings of the conference. Please cite the book as: Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss (ed.), Owen Kelly (ed.), “Future Learning Spaces”, 2011, Helsinki, Aalto University publication series, ISBN 978-952-60-4517-7 http://www.designsonelearning2011.com/ Examine the effectiveness of inter-college and HEI collaborations & Develop an Arts-UKOER ‘Remix and Redistribute’ community of practice. Content communities and interest groups Late in 2011 I was approached by a member of UAL staff who was running a research and conference network and held events and conferences every 6 months in 4 separate universities across the world, they were looking to set up a repository space for their resources. They had looked at various options and had been quoted thousands of pounds for various formal repository systems. I offered to develop a content group on process.arts if they would fund the cost of employing a student drupal developer for 5 days. The space was developed within a week, we provided a bespoke space with group banner in showing on all associated resources, links to external sites, a group forum, group tag cloud and post and comment RSS feeds. Fashion Colloquia http://process.arts.ac.uk/category/discipline/fashion/fashion-colloquia. The group was left to individuals to build a network of users and resources in collaboration with support for me on the site. With the developers we also set up a basic framework where we could add more groups easily, I could add these groups myself. The specialist group sections have continued to develop and we now have 15 active groups. Once a community can commit and want to take 'ownership' of a specialist section we have develop this requirement appropriately. Future approach we can take: Once the group is fully established in the existing sections and maybe wants to expand we can start planning the development of the possible satellite specialist sites, this site would be an agile development project with the specialist community and the wider process.arts community and could address the following issues: Creating the first unique bespoke satellite web space for a specialist area with links and integration (advanced search/CSS etc) to the process.arts site and community. The new connected space would have specific design and functionality to accommodate the groups needs but remain connected to the process.arts community and wider networks. One of the key aspects the Fashion Colloquia group liked about being on process.arts was that their resources we’re also mixed with the meta data of other resources and therefore presented interesting connections across disciplines. We are now using the process.arts groups for the DIAL project groups and content communities http://dial.myblog.arts.ac.uk/dial-groups/ Drupal ‘true open source for in-house development’ Process.arts was initially developed by UAL in-house developers in 2008 and development continued or was taken over by teaching staff and student developers who practiced as in-house drupal developers. Seeing the benefits of using in-house student developer on process.arts I bid for funding to develop a ‘drupal UAL’ in-house community of practice for student and staff webmakers to explore and gain skills in drupal development http://process.arts.ac.uk/category/project-groups/drupal-ual. The below feedback from our student developer is part of ‘Open practice stories’ http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/open-practice-stories “I had knowledge and some practice with web programming already, but it was completely unexpected to find myself dealing with OERs. From the point of view of a student, familiarising myself with the site both for the technical aspects and its concept, I now realize has taught me a variety of new skills, only the most obvious being related to web programming. The more unexpected ones, as said above, have been the discovery of Open Educational Resources and of the wider debate around digital integration into higher education. By creating and sharing contents on process.arts I've had the possibility to experience first-hand a very useful tool for learning, to test its potentialities and to envisage the possible limits of such digital tools in educational contexts. These last discoveries brought me to decide to write my dissertation precisely on these issues. The real potentialities OERs offer to students I believe have yet to be fully understood. In my case, web programming skills have been very useful so far to start building websites professionally outside college. Regarding the learning, I think the community these virtual spaces naturally create can push students to be more engaged with their learning paths. In summary, my experience with ALTO, JISC and process.arts has been highly beneficial in many ways, academically and professionally. Surely I think OERs need to be explored further, nevertheless process.arts has been a fertile ground for future explorations.” Drupal (http://drupal.org/) is a free and open source content management system which allows users to develop and create free web sites by adapting its free code and software. Drupal is an industry standard software used by many individuals, groups, companies, charities and governments including whitehouse.gov mtv.co.uk and data.gov.uk. Drupal.org has a large community of users and developers, with over 648,000 user accounts and over 10,000 developer accounts Wikipedia [accessed Feb 1st 2012]. Findings The aims of the SCORE Fellowship Project are to explore relationships between traditional arts practice and OER practice. Institutional perspectives Creating OER and OEP friendly web environments and open communities to encourage sustainable Open Online Practice. At University of the Arts London I had the fortune of working closely with phases 2 and 3 of the JISC UKOER programme on ALTO project where I gained first hand experience of how an institution develops an OER repository system. In parallel with this I was developing the process.arts web environment and communities through my SCORE fellowship. Contrasting the two approaches I have summarized below what I see as the distinct differences between the two and I would argue that many forward-thinking universities may benefit from the inclusion, early planning and adoption of a sustainable OER eco systems which includes ‘in-house’ development projects, grassroots innovation, developers and webmakers, specifically working with true open source software and up-to-date web2.0 environments . ALTO UAL developed its repository (Filestore http://alto.arts.ac.uk/filestore/ ) using Southampton’s ePrints software. Process.arts had already been in development for over a year prior to the ALTO project and funding. Process.arts was an ongoing live agile experimental education/social OER web project and as the ALTO developed it was acknowledge early in the ALTO planning that process.arts provides a valuable informal ‘social community OER layer/platform’ currently missing from conventional repository system. The ALTO ecosystem The project started with a strong focus on acquiring and installing digital repository software to handle the completed OERs, this had the secondary aim of enhancing the ability of UAL staff to manage their own learning resources internally. The repository software package 'EdShare' was chosen, a variant of the popular research paper repository 'Eprints' supplied by Southampton University. A design for the customised version of the EdShare system together with a metadata schema was developed (based on the Dublin Core metadata standard) and agreed. Repository software is optimized for storage and management and operates using a library paradigm - which is great for that particular purpose, but is not so good at presenting or publishing information. The presentational limitations of repository software became apparent in the context of ALTO and the Art and Design academic community, who traditionally place a high importance on 'look and feel' i.e. affective and usability issues. Similarly, in the wider world of OER the emphasis is much more on presentation, publication and communication. The ALTO project realised that while a repository might be a first step, it alone would not be enough, we came to understand that ALTO would need to be more than just one software tool - it would need to be a system of connected and related tools. The repository gave us a place to safely and reliably store resources in the long-term for which there was already a strong demand. But there was also a question of how ALTO might fit with other UAL information resources created by staff and projects that were being hosted on the open web outside of the official UAL infrastructure, which had been quickly blossoming over several years, often using Web 2.0 tools and services. We came to see that ALTO needed to fit into this wider and dynamic 'ecosystem' of online resources and associated communities. Two things became clear. First, was that resources in the repository would need to be easily 'surfaced' in other contexts in the wider UAL information ecosphere and beyond, in a variety of social media to aid dissemination and impact. Second, that the other components of the UAL ecosystem might want to use the repository to deposit some of their outputs now that the possibility of a long term storage area was possible. The 'Eprints' system although promoted as an ‘out of the box’ solution and ‘open source’ system in reality is a more complicated, restrictive and difficult to manage and develop ‘out of the box’ for most HEI in-house web teams. All users of 'Eprints' I spoke to admit the software was restrictive (in an agile development sense) the code was too complicated (specialised) for an in-house team to truly adopt and adapt. The ‘enforced’ reliance of a contracted service for me cast serious doubt on the sustainable development and future of OER repositories running on theses systems. Also see ALTO project manager John Casey’s perspective on these older repository systems http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/open-practice-stories#comment-1805. OEP platforms: Combining institutional support & grass roots activity for developing sustainable Open Educational Practice. In 2012 UAL began the process of rebuilding its VLE framework, and process.arts was identified as a valuable resource that could fit into the University’s new portfolio of tools; consequently, process.arts is due to be officially introduced as a supported ‘service’ in September 2012. However, the structure of process.arts does not map onto courses; meta data links user-generated pieces of openly licensed text, image, video and audio content together through individual profiles and subject specific interest groups. Like many web2.0 environments used for education, process.arts can neither really be described as a repository nor as a VLE. Because of this it provides a novel and alternative VLE environment that encourages and supports rich media experimentation and informal learning, a welcome alternative for many to commercial alternatives. Conversion to a full service will provide a firm foundation for long-term stability, integration with other systems, support and growth. The project team is in the process of integrating the current informal agile development approach into a more formal in-house system. The team are addressing outstanding bugs, monitoring user interface changes and identifying outstanding functionality. There will inevitably be some loss of agile spontaneity although we aim to retain the overall grass roots participatory feel. We are currently considering the pros and cons of mainstreaming, and are continually evaluating what we would consider as a balanced approach, based on the experience of this transition to date. OEP communities and stewardship There is currently no middle ground within our institutional networks to facilitate the development of OER content communities. How can the proliferation of open education/social media content groups and networks support the process of cultural change and OER stewardship in these new alternative open online spaces for artists, teachers, students and practitioners? Group and mentor development There is some difficulty encouraging participation and interaction, the recent drawing out group (conference group) were all asked by their group facilitators to uploaded their own work to process.arts, they all did this without any problems http://process.arts.ac.uk/category/project-groups/drawing-out-2012. There was no visible presence on the group space and I feel like other groups, the lack of visible online presence or group mentor means little or no debate. In contrast this forum http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/2-or-3-things-start is starting to get comments/ interaction on its subject, because Jess and David the group/project ‘owners’ are actively online and engaged, pushing the debate forward.   The important thing is that groups have a few experts or active interested members posting on the group and who are a regularly actively presence in this space encouraging, setting up debates and adding support etc. This is a core skill of being doing ‘open online practice’, its not something you can necessarily learn its something you do and keep on doing. SKILLS SUPPORT (HAND HOLDING) OPEN ONLINE PRACTICE By skill I mean those skills that can be obtained easily, the type of skills that are generic and are accessible and available to most e.g. I want to learn Photoshop, I go on a course or I search youtube and watch a video. I want to learn MS word, I’ll go on a staff development day. Hand holding, being able to find content and answers easily, some know where to look some don’t, information underload within the practice based art and design sector means these places for support do not yet exist. Fun example of being able to seek advice for a random problem, the problem was answered with the hour of posting: http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/metalwork-problem who’s holding our hands for the other less resourced or open subject areas? Skills in this area are a lot more difficult to obtain, open online practice courses do not yet exist, if they did is this something you can be taught? These ‘skills’ are self learnt and leant through practice. Support and encourage the use and reuse of OER practices using rich media content. OEP and Intellectual property rights Feedback from focus groups and from general discussions shows a great deal of confusion and lack of general clarity and understanding as the main IPR problems for staff. Case study: OEP and Intellectual property rights The IPR culture at UAL as I have known it has always been dismissive of IPR policy, the general rule of thumb is ‘don’t go there’. The ALTO project, running in parallel with the SCORE fellowship provide sufficient support and development in the complex area of UALs ‘out dated’ intellectual property rights policy. The ALTO project had achieved some useful groundwork in the areas of policy change/awareness, specifically within the adoption and use of creative commons licence, although the wider IPR concerns and the reality of creative commons and OER IPR are largely unresolved. IPR UAL case study This SCORE case study highlights potential future issues and conflicts between old and new IPR cultures and policies. Mid-way through my fellowship I found a resource produced as a ‘handbook’ on our institutional research repository. The resource had been produced by a member of UAL staff and deposited into the research repository and on Jorum under a BY creative commons licence for over 2 years and was the output of a UAL funded fellowship project. I copied the resource as a whole and shared on process.arts unchanged under an equivalent licence. The resource was on process.arts for over 6 months and received a great response. I decided to contact the author so ‘they’ could share in positive feedback the resource was attracting. In response I received a very strong and aggressive series of emails demanding I remove the handbook from process.arts as it had since been published and I would be prosecuted by the publishes for a breach of copyright. Without question I removed the resource, luckily I knew where I could pass this issue on to a relevant support/department within my university called center for learning and teaching CLTAD. Fortunately they dealt with the wider implications and matters were resolved. For me and I predict for others who may find themselves in a similar situation in the future, the whole process of dealing with angry authors, serious threats and other complexities can be very stressful one. On a positive note this event has helped to highlight ‘real world’ problems within UALs current IPR and IP policy. It’s hoped the work and experiences of SCORE, ALTO and DIAL will support and promote future discussion and policy change in this area. The handbook itself was removed from all open web spaces and made unavailable online, the 96 page handbook was only available through the online publisher at a cost of just under £40. Prior to all this the handbook received thousands of views and comments and was listed top rank in online searches showing in process.arts, research online and Jorum (not showing on the publishers site), it now does not exist in any searches and therefore off the students radar of useful resources. IPR policy change My work with SCORE, DIAL and ALTO has supported the development of the institutional IPR by supporting a lot of the sphilosophy and practice of IP in relation to digital projects and the IP implications of OER. UAL have commissioned a reevaluation of its IPR and has prepared a summary of the issues for UAL presenting these initial proposals for the redevelopment of the IP strategy and policies to the Executive Board. For this I provided my on the ground perspectives having been at UAL for 8 years involved in teaching and projects. I made it clear that feedback from staff suggest they would like simplified and more clearly illustrated examples of the most common scenarios, specifically around copying and sharing online e.g. one scenario could be: "I'm a UAL learning and teaching fellow, I copy and reuse a creative commons licensed work I found on another colleges website, I add this to my own resource and release the remixed resource under the same CC license conditions, I have developed this resource at home in my own time and at work, it will be published online on an OER website like http://process.arts.ac.uk/ , are there any IPR implications of this I should be considering in this process ? Practicing open online practice myself I've encountered one confusing and stressful situation (that could happen in the future on a larger scale to others as more staff start to explore open practice) and I think the direction and guidance given to the staff who are producing resources from UAL fellowships and secondments needs to be clarified across the board. My question for UAl would be: Where are the accessible/informal and integrated spaces at UAL (I'm not sure own-it is up to speed/in-touch with UAL current practice) that are integrated into current practice that support, teach and help us to be socialised into the ins and outs of IPR in practice? There's a couple of links below of where IP for open educational practice has been addressed: What does open educational practice mean to you? - http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/what-does-open-educational-practice-mean-you IPR tag on process.arts -http://process.arts.ac.uk/category/tags/ipr Investigate and evaluate the most effective and efficient ways of utilising OER in arts HEIs by identifying best processes and practices for creating learning resources/objects to support the learning and teaching. Observe and contrast current practice in the OER community. Searching OER In support of pursuing the search and find solutions here's some feedback from a small survey we did at UAL: Question: Which digital skill sets are important to you? Knowing where to search. Because there can be all this stuff out there but if you don’t know where to look… there should be resources to teach others how to narrow things down. Knowing where to look and how. We should be told more about resources available, more advertising done for them. Knowing how to search for information. There should be a search engine in Blackboard to make it easier to find things. Searching online for the right thing. The problem of OER reuse remains consistently on the agenda for the movement as a whole. For some subjects the proliferation of open content resources in specific subject areas has made finding useful and quality content for use and reuse easier, although has also presented new challenges regarding search and find and surfacing content in the right places. One of the key challenges for open practice and research for teachers and students is finding or being directed to the useful open content. Google searches will produce some relevant resources but there are more risks in terms of the quality of the content and the re-usability of the resource. Finding resources for use in art and design teaching is difficult, and even advanced searches in google take time and may return little or no usable open content. The same search in centralised OER repositories would provide a high quantity of appropriate results within a very narrow ‘local’ field of view. There is a strong argument for a ‘national’ centralised subject specific OER repository; however in the current financial climate the long term sustainably of such a resource is questionable. A centralised service could also be seen as insufficiently addressing the needs of particular universities and subjects. Many courses within Universities wish to manage, develop and host their own bespoke OER environments as far as possible, in preference to going outside and submitting to national repositories. FASTER OER I hope to develop and explore new tools and standards for creating an ‘all-in-one’ open educational resources (OER) single subject specific federated search environment. I would like to develop a tool that ‘plugs’ into and cluster various subject specific OER content websites and archives spread across many different locally managed platforms. The single search will enable users to search and find hjgh quality OER content quickly and efficiently for a broad subject-related field. The OER content creators will be better able to surface their content within a focussed federated environment with minimal effort. Creating resources Image and text OERs Teachers may just have time to upload the PDF of their resource and no time to reproduce or convert these valuable resources into OER web/user friendly versions, e.g. viewable and web searchable OERs so all sections can be easily viewed, discovered and copied in a single web page, in part (images or text sections) as well as in full. There is a growing ‘need/role’ for a culture of crowd source reuse development of OERs so the OER community builds on or converts PDF or text only OERs which have been developed by others, making the resource mutually beneficial (preferably contacting the author or acknowledging possible mutual interests for future collaborative 'crowd' production). In a way OERs become versioned and progressively 'improve/develop' by being live and open. Example one: A teacher uploads a really in-depth and detailed image and text tutorial adding a screen shot with a link to the PDF. - http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/best-way-get-final-cut-project-sequence-dvd-using-compressor-and-dvd-studio-pro-software (Note this teacher has used a CC0 1.0 Universal license) Example two: The opposite of this see’s a tutor create a complex OER friendly OER but without the PDF although there is a printer friendly option where the user could create a basic PDF version - http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/using-pulleys-electric-motors Example three: And in this example we have the web post and PDF included. http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/calculating-point-which-piece-box-section-steel-will-bend-and-not-recover Video OERs I’ve explored many differ ways of developing video resources and creating online video networks and generally publishing online. There is currently active research in this area at the university and I was asked to take part in the UAL teaching fellowship panel where research bids into video resource development were successfully selected http://process.arts.ac.uk/category/tags/video. There are also examples of staff starting to voluntarily support others and process.arts by creating help tutorials ‘How To Convert Video For Web Upload using MPEG Streamclip Open Source Software?’ http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/how-convert-video-web-upload-using-mpeg-streamclip-open-source-software also see comments on this post. Example 1: This video demonstrates a really low tech, quick demonstration/example/experiment of how an editor and a content producer could save time and edit together without having to be in the same space, leaving them to do what they do best in their own time, sustainable collaborative reuse example for the OER and OEP community. http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/co-editing-experiment Example 2: Shared OER (Open educational resource) video editing FCP server - In this video from the learning studio event, Chris Follows talks about ways of making best practical use of art and design OER (Open educational resource) video content and how to share and co-edit resources across institutions and the sector I would like to explore the in's and out's of setting up an open Server and co-editing environment for shared storage, use, re-purpose and publishing of art and design video learning and teaching video resources for the six colleges of UAL and to be opened to other external HEIs in the future. http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/shared-oer-open-educational-resource-video-editing-fcp-server Example 3: The ‘video remix space’ (VRS) explores the creative and educational potential, challenges, limitations and benefits of repurposing open online video content. The VRS is a proposed project only no funding to date. The VRS aims to create a new accessible creative educational community for artists, teachers and students of all levels and across a range of disciplines. Participants from professional to novice will learn as part of a community how to create, share and repurpose online video content into new experimental ‘found footage’ narratives. http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/video-remix-space Example 4: Found footage CC0 1.0 experiment, all content must be zero licence in this group. http://process.arts.ac.uk/category/project-groups/found-footage-cc0-10 Some Examples of staff content: http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/examples-staff-content Examples of when process.arts has worked particularly well for students: http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/examples-when-processarts-has-worked-particularly-well-students-1st-draft OPEN ONLINE PRACTICE: Defining open online practice and how can we bring about changes in belief and attitude? It’s important to understand existing cultures before introducing new cultures. It’s easy for educational developers or OER specialists to lose touch or truly understand the needs and practices of its stakeholders. To support the understanding of the meaning of ‘practice’ in the context of open educational practice and art and design, we can reference Shreeve’s (2008) five categories of practice (Shreeve, A. (2008). Transitions: variations in tutors' experience of practice and teaching relations in art and design. PhD Thesis, Lancaster University, Lancaster): Shreeve’s 5 Categories of practice. Relationships between professional practice and teaching practice. Category 1: Dropping in. There is an asymmetrical relationship between practice and teaching with the focus on practice. Knowledge from practice is seen as being passed on to the student. Category 2: Moving across. There is an asymmetrical relationship between practice and teaching with the focus on teaching. Knowledge from practice is used in teaching students. Category 3: Two Camps. There is a symmetrical relationship between practice and teaching, but they are seen as two different and separate things and tension exists between them. Knowledge from practice is used in teaching students. Category 4: Balancing. There is a symmetrical relationship between practice and teaching with a fluid exchange of knowledge between both. Category 5: Integrating. There is a holistic relationship between practice and teaching. There is an elision between practice and teaching knowledge and they become one and the same thing. Art practice and openness (the arts practitioner) The examples below reflect a specific perspective of an arts practitioner although art, design and media subjects at UAL reflect a greater variety of subjects from fashion, design, media, theatre and performance; the core challenges of public facing practice are common to most. At UAL as with other art colleges tutors, academics and technicians are all Art and Design practitioners and specialists in their field of practice. They are familiar with notions of sharing their ideas and publishing, exhibiting, performing and showing their work and concepts in public. Exhibitions/shows/art events for example are often accompanied by educational/academic research insights or information about the work e.g. the artist talk, sketchbooks, studio video interviews, audio guides, handouts, websites and books etc. The artist’s studio The dynamics of a shared artist studio environment complex are similar to that of a college environment, it provides a personal space to work and a communal space to share ideas and interact with fellow practitioners on a daily basis. The ‘open studio’ are also a good example of practitioners sharing their practice in public, once or twice a year ‘solitary’ arts studio spaces are opened to the world, the public are invited into the artist domain to see how and where they work, there are varying degrees of openness: Some literally open their doors so visitors see the unedited ‘real life’ day-to-day working environments, Some tidy and curate their spaces so they can hide and surface specific content they want to be viewed, Others present their spaces as a white cube exhibition removing all traces of the studio activity and practice, Some choose to not open their doors; what lies behind the door is a mystery to all. The open studios could be seen as a good analogy for how staff may approach degrees of openness online in their teaching practice, what can the outsider, student or colleagues see or understand about our teaching practice. 4 categories of open educational practice The role of open technologies in encouraging sharing and reuse of open content can only become a reality if the open technologies are being developed with and for the stakeholders involved. There cannot be one OEP to suit all, there's four, which one are you? 4 categories of open educational practice OEP, from focus group meetings, general feedback, observation and research. Also see D.White, Oxford, visitors and residents (accessed April 2012) OEP unaware (Novice) OEP aware (visitor) OEP starter (lodger) OEP resident Never heard of or know what open educational practice is, not sure how it relates to them. Interested in the notion of practicing or being online as a professional, happy to learn more & observer others. Look and use online resources regularly with little awarnes of OERs and not does not produce or contribute their own OERs. Has been involved and interested with online activities but now starting to explore the new potential of open educational practice and OERs. Start to create online resources with creative commons licenses, still searching for the ideal place to settle, live and practice OER and OEP. Will have many homes. keen to understand more about the open movement and creative commons. Posts and comments OER content daily. Has one main 'permanent' online professional/educational community domain (OER home) but uses various commercial social/rich media channels to feed, promote, debate and find OERs, a combined (Edu/social) space. Contributes to the OER community and supports others in OEP personal and professional development. Interested in wide variety of OER subjects and not only their specialist subjects but the multidisciplinary possibilities. What does open educational practice mean to you? It’s not something I’ve engaged in. I don’t know what I would put online Students are online I’m offline its not my space, I’m the face to face contact. Open is seen as content not anything else We use other people’s resources more than create our own. We don’t always monitor the quality of these resources. Consume more content through more hobbyist produced materials rather than through the professionals eLearning content. You have to acknowledge what is it; you’re dealing with something that is quite woolly, vague concept, can’t be grasped? I see OEP as making my life easier. I like to cluster/tag information & to link and reference content together, ideas and connections together can be openly viewed and developed. Its good to have it out in the world rather than hidden away, old content keeps popping up, its easy to reuse & update. Read more here: http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/4-categories-open-educational-practice OPEN ONLINE PRACTICE. There are two possible levels to open practice in the creative sector, as the teaching/technical staff are all teacher/practitioners. As in Shreeve’s (2008) five categories of practice. ‘Transitions: variations in tutors' experience of practice and teaching relations in art and design’, above we can see how all these different categories of practice can have an impact on the relationship of teaching practice and professional creative practice and the notion of open online practice adds a third layer of complexity to this already complex list of categories and definitions of practice. The below table attempts to illustrate how openness in practice will inevitably include both educational practice and professional practice if its to prosper, this would present wider implications for moving towards open practice and the relationship of open practice with profession and employability. This may also see a move away from the definition of open educational practice (with a focus on education) towards a combined catchall definition of OPEN ONLINE PRACTICE. TRADITIONAL PRACTICE - UNAWARE OR CAUTIONS OF OPENNESS Dropping in. There is an asymmetrical relationship between online learning & teaching practice & traditional teaching practice with the focus on traditional teaching. PRACTICE OPENNESS AND PRACTICE OPEN ONLINE PRACTICE Integrating. There is a holistic relationship between traditional teaching practice, open educational practice & open professional creative practice. Learning and teaching practice (academic & technical) More details see link below Open Educational Practice OEP 4 categories of open educational practice: 1. OEP unaware (Novice) 2. OEP aware (visitor) 3. OEP starter (lodger) 4. OEP resident More details see link below Professional creative practice (arts/design studio practice, creative industries) Open creative practitioner Open studios, website, blogs, professional networks, social media networks, rich media networks, online arts video debates etc. Artist example For more details on practice and open educational practice definitions see http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/4-categories-open-educational-practice Collective anxieties The new open world brings with it a number of new anxieties such as teachers’ fear of being seen as learning in public, dealing with the discomfort of making curricular resources public and anxieties relating to presenting having an online identity. Process.arts provides a space for staff and students to challenge these anxieties collectively. Examine the effectiveness of inter-college and HEI collaborations. Reuse I was contacted by the developers of bronzecasting.co.uk, they were very interested in process.arts, the site was introduced to staff at UAL and holds interesting potential regarding collaborative remixing of resources in the future. The bronzecasting.co.uk were information and text heavy and UAL could make good use of these OERs and add to these resources by developing the visual aspects, images etc. It would make an interesting experiment for the collaborative remixing of content and licences. http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/metalwork-finishing-index-bronzecastingcouk Process.arts user/member of staff commented: “What a fantastic resource, I'll forward this link to the sculpture technicians here at Wimbledon. It would be great to add some more images from their experience's as educators. This is an excellent opportunity to forge some collaborations and promote open educational resources.” Comments and Communication (twitter, forums) One of the key challenges on process.arts is to encourage communication and debate, the introduction of forums and the integration and active use of twitter is also useful. This example demonstrates the essential part twitter can play in developing interaction, I hope to start looking at how we can automate this process of linking twitter comments with post comments: Reply to: The Humanity of Drawing: An artist's journey @iamcreative: that article I @iamcreative: that article I retweeted from @ProcessArtsUAL puts into words some of my own reasons for drawing - I've struggled to verbalise that before ALSO see Feedback on process.arts: http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/feedback-processarts and open practice stories - http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/open-practice-stories Reflection Being a ‘resident’ in open online practice on process.arts over the past year has allowed time and space to build a personal and public methods and approaches for developing open online practice. I have spent the past year effectively practicing, teaching and demonstrating ‘my way’ of doing open practice, and this is reflected in the resources I have produced, specifically in the SCORE on process.arts section. I have also observed others doing open practice or finding their way of doing it, trying to find their own path, their own way of being open. OEP Unaware to OEP aware (from dropping in to moving across) How do the OEP unaware become OEP aware? There has to be a small element of need and want, without a ‘give it ago’ attitude it can be a frustrating and time consuming experience for all involved. Time being the key concern in many ways. Making time to explore the ‘open’ is one of the main concerns that seem to come out in all discussions and feedback sessions I’ve encountered. Time and fear, fear of not getting it or having a feeling of being overwhelmed by everything, one person remarked at a recent presentation I was giving to academic leaders that they ‘feel sick when they hear people talk about all this new digital stuff, it’s all too much and too overwhelming, I just don’t know where to start’. Another staff member commented through our online survey: “At present if you are a bit of technophobe, it’s like looking at a baroque palace full of parties going on in hundreds of rooms but with no doors or staircases”. This is representative of the majority of staff at UAL as in most institutions, it’s also important that individuals and institutions are not seen as promoting or pushing people into open education but seen as supporting the imminent transition into openness for everyone. The open educational movement is already in danger of becoming that 'baroque palace’ an elite network of specialists who advocate ‘openness’ and are rarely self-critical of the movement or invite criticism. With the rapid pace of technological development also comes a danger of being seen as too, specialised and advanced, which could marginalise those on the periphery. A lot of time and effort is required in order to raise awareness of open practice and we are not always going to have the luxury of JISC funded OER projects to support peoples transition into the open. Open practice is not a skill or a technical problem as such, it’s a practice and at present there’s no rules or means of being socialised into open educational practice, its up to us to build those networks and create that language. This is the attraction the motivation that drives the transition from unaware to aware, clearly illustrated in the feedback below from one teacher during a focus group meeting. “It has an unknown potential, its great to be part of something that’s emerging” OEP aware to OEP visitor Once OEP aware we need to provide the support and environments for those entering OEP so progression can be sustainable and progressive, this means ‘officially’ embedding into institutional practice (as in educational practice) and into individual/practitioner practice (as a creative practitioner). UAL will explore how it ‘officially’ embeds OEP into institutional practice through the development of its new OEP PG Cert unit. The SCORE fellowship supported successful JISC proposal, CPDF Open Academic Practice Unit, to the Open Educational Resources Programme, Phase 3, PG Cert Development Strand. Supporting UAL in this development. “This project is a ‘capstone’ for UAL, building on UAL’s existing OER projects (ALTO and ALTO-UK), and UAL’s DIAL project, part of the JISC Digital Literacies programme. It will make use of the existing experience and skills of UAL staff, including those of DIAL Project Manager and OU SCORE Fellow, Chris Follows”. - http://oepractice.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2012/05/24/project-plan-for-oep-unit/ My notes for the PG Cert Open Educational practice Unit including learning outcomes - http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/unit-title-open-educational-practice OEP unit group development notes on Google docs - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1llO7yFnLS7f7ftifHFoyoraHM7wqcwQhswmp3zJNd6s/edit Through SCORE I supported the early development of DIAL, leading an open education project at UAL. The DIAL projects provide opportunity for personal reflections on personal roles and address some long-standing challenges people want to tackle, and perhaps up to now have not had the time or resources to attend to them. Early evaluation of all the DIAL pilot projects, including SCORE supported ‘Open education at UAL’ presented some common themes across projects, primarily fear and anxiety. Teachers’ fear of learning in public (Online reflective practice) Dealing with the discomfort of making curricular resources public. (Open educational resources) Anxieties relating to presenting oneself in video and online (Professional identity) To support a potential mass transition into the ‘open’ and to provide a sustainable framework to address and support students and staff in the new open world could educational social media content networks like process.arts provide the open local subject specific support a community may need? Can we provide sustainable support through voluntary participation and the crowdsourcing the combined experience of staff & students? Participants may find their a novice and expert at the same time in these new digital domains. Externalising courses and resources specifically practice based courses like Fine Art painting and sculpture for example could be seen as a tricky proposition, what actually happens on a Fine Art course? To the outsider it can seem a bit of a mystery, like the closed studio door. Could making a Fine Art course open be seen as destroying its mystery or does ‘The teaching as mystery metaphor’ as Brookfield, S. (1995) suggests: “excuses teachers from having to answer such basic questions as 'how do you know when you are teaching well?', 'how do you know your students are learning?' and 'how could your practice be made more responsive?" Seeing teaching as mysterious works against the improvement of practice. If good or bad teaching are all a matter of chance then there is no point trying to do better. The teaching as mystery metaphor also closes down the possibility of teachers sharing knowledge, insights, and informal theories of practice since mystery is, by definition, incommunicable.” In the current competitive climate for attracting students on courses, externalising the inner workings of course may quickly become a essential practice. OEP visitor to OEP resident and bespoke OEP Environments A fundamental aspect of OEP development and sustainable open practice is the search for a space or home to practice (to live), the space has to fit your needs and the needs of your cohort. On process.arts I have tried to develop or demonstrate how we can build open content communities of practice in an informal space, process.arts demonstrates there’s a real need these lively and dynamic spaces to discus, practice and teach open practice. In my various communities of practice I have had many online and offline conversations with individuals about open practice, some I’ve seen develop and others have either backed away or I’ve lost contact with. Maintaining an online network is extremely hard work, you have to meet the need of the community and there’s a sense that if needs are not met the community could fail. I tried various spaces including open learn and cloudworks http://cloudworks.ac.uk/user/view/3728 they were not for me, they did not provide the subject specific or local feel I had been trying to develop on process.arts. Apart from the significant personal development I gained in developing practice and open communities of practice I also made huge development in my webmaking skills and understating in terms of how web environments can be constructed or be made to work and support sustainable OEP. As rich media OER becomes more common, and more and more learning content is released online, we may need people within institutions with webmaking skills. Third party commercial platforms are quickly becoming our primary institution repositories and commercial social networking tools are our primary community spaces. What if students and staff do not want to be in a particular commercial networking space (for ethical reasons for example), what if the commercial space changes its policy, issues more charges, add advertisements etc. Do we really want our primary repository spaces to be commercial? What if students and staff don’t want advertisements on their learning video resources or being restricted to watching on specific platforms or downloading restrictive codecs? Handling OER Rich media: Before jumping into iTunes U, colleges really need to have a plan/strategy for how it manages its internal video production and how it archives/makes available and licenses video it produces. Colleges, or specifically at UAL we really need to establish a unified cross college systems for regular video production and archiving, then they can select from their own video archive pot the ‘best/most appropriate’ videos to feed through to commercial channels in specific contexts like iTunes (learning videos, marketing etc), YouTube etc. Many institutions don’t have the ‘foresight’ to create their own in-house open online video archive/platforms so have to rely solely on external commercial channels like iTunes as their primary platform or video archive, this could present problems in the future. Commercial media channels really should be secondary channels not primary. I’m a big fan of commercial channels but I don’t think colleges should be putting all its eggs into one commercial basket, all videos produced by the institution should be made available and accessible at all times to everyone and be free from commercial fees, conditions and advertising. If institutions have their own in-house video archive and learning networks they could directly benefit from the communities built around them. In-house and externally hosted archives can also be mutually beneficial, and if sometime in the future the institution wants to withdraw from a commercial platform they can without fear of being too tied into one host and losing that all important community. Process.arts is a good example of a platform where video is archived and available for download, user uploaded and stored on its in-house platform (example). The video resources build up their own unique local subject specific communities network, different from the same videos which are filtered out into YouTube (secondary channel example) these attract a different, larger and wider audience and are sometimes difficult to manage. Funded OER Genetically Modified OER Organic OER Non organic Quick turnover Mass market Artificial Commercially viable OER commercial control External/commercial sites Blogs, wikis, social media, iTunesU etc. Un-funded/in-house – developed from grass roots process.arts A mixture of all three of these approaches is required in the OEP eco system, although it’s a fine balance to develop a sustainable and progressive OEP environment. Further work The transition of process.arts into a service means for the first time we have an opportunity to explore and understand its function within the wider VLE portfolio of tools. A recent survey of existing tools and developing tools was carried out amongst staff, the results confirmed process.arts successful integration as an OEP tool used in practice, clear evidence that unfunded grass roots initiatives can provide a sustainable OEP future and meet growing needs. This survey also confirms the importance of ‘OEP observation’ the OEP aware/visitor need spaces like process.arts just to observe open practice in practice. Please see feedback from survey respondents. Blackboard (Official service) the institutional VLE for course delivery, blackboard and CLTAD managed Blackboard I use less and less but it’s good for globally email student groups. Blackboard for teaching materials Blackboard is okay as a filing system… although like any filing system it doesn’t help you read the mind of the person who organised it. Bb for communication with students and staff and distributing resources I use blackboard to communicate with my students Blackboard is used to coordinate staff activities and record issues/policy changes Lynda (online training) and MyBlog (blogs) are both used by almost half of the respondents – by 47% and 46% respectively. MyBlog.arts (Official service) in-house blogging service run on wordpress and CLTAD managed Responsible for updating CLTAD blogs – finding out what’s going on. The blogs are great and Mike is a star for being so responsive to development requests. I use the myblog arts site for a student group blog and my PG Cert blog. I am using the blogs for DIAL. Lynda.com (Official service) commercial subscribed to service providing training videos for software applications. Learning skills Lynda for learning software I use the new access we have to lynda.com to update my skills in Illustrator process.arts an open online resource sharing day-to-day arts practice and research of arts staff, students, alumni and practitioners. Voluntary run and managed (transitioning into a service Sept 2012) Process.arts is used by 19% of respondents I use it for archiving my own processes and I often point students to them verbally. I like to show real world examples of work. Research/finding out what people are doing Process Arts as a repository for research paper for the ‘fashion conference group’ which I help promote. Process Arts is great – I’m getting the PG Cert participants to upload their project videos to it next month. Process arts just to view what is on there I use process arts for my own research and would love the opportunity to design content for this site. I have searched Process arts and ALTO, and in the near future I will be uploading content to both. And the new workflow.arts (ePortfolio site) by 15%. ‘Other’ services are used by 16% – popular platforms here are likely to include commonplace.arts and showtime.arts amongst others. Alto.arts is used by 8% of the respondents – this is also a new service and as a repository for hosting and sharing Open Education Resources its use is poised to grow significantly. Workflow is new to the VLE portfolio, a highly flexible e-portfolio system which allows users to store their media files in the cloud, and design and publish web pages with full control over sharing options. Have only just started using Workflow, I have high hopes for it. Workflow for student portfolios. I am looking at workflow as a communication tool. Course development and institutional integration There is clear evidence from the survey above that grass roots development and initiatives can be as crucially important to the portfolio of an institutional flexible learning/VLE eco system. The above survey shows process.arts is used more than some official institutional services and funded projects like ALTO. So how can we make best use of grass roots innovation in our institutions to support sustainable open practice without homogenising innovation? At UAL we are currently at this interesting transition point, we are developing a new VLE with Moodle and a suite of tools to support the wider VLE portfolio. SCORE, DIAL and ALTO have all been at the heart of this development and the institutional adoption of open educational practice. As process.arts moves into an official service we have the opportunity to test this integration and develop and expand grass roots innovation and needs. The above survey feedback provides some indication of what tools are used for and what is missing: VLE Blackboard/Moodle for delivery of course details and communication (formal) this space should be the central portal for all of the tools within the VLE portfolio. Student feedback from the college baseline blogs is clear, saying students would like to find all information in one place (the VLE) so we should be clever about how we integrate and embed the VLE suite of tools. http://ualdigitalbaseline.myblog.arts.ac.uk/about/ This would allow us to experiment with the suite of tools we have and develop new tools. For example process.arts may benefit from the addition of course specific sections separate from the informal space but connected this way tutors can have a bespoke readymade web environment that’s integrated with other courses and with the wider VLE and is also place to share OER content and gain OEP awareness, OEP becomes truly integrated in the tools, culture and practices of institution, staff and students. Dissemination All SCORE related dissemination can be seen here: http://process.arts.ac.uk/category/tags/score-dissemination?page=1 CONFERENCES IN UK OER12 Cambridge April 16-18 2012: Presentation 1 - SCORE paper - Open educational social media content groups and networks within the arts, design & media education. See recording here: http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/audio-recording-cambridge-2012-processarts-case-study OER12: panel - Embed, don't bolt-on: promoting OER use in UK universities: http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/embed-dont-bolt-promoting-oer-use-uk-universities OER12: Presentation 2 - SCORE/ALTOUK OER - Disciplinary and Institutional Perspectives on Open Educational Practice in Art, Design and Media Studies: Opportunities and Challenges HEA Conference 4 July 2012 - 30 minute paper presentation, session title: Exploring OER rich media reuse through social media content communities - http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/exploring-oer-rich-media-reuse-through-social-media-content-communities-hea-annual-conferenc SCORE and process.arts video for HEA OER stand - http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/processarts-video-hea-oer-stand ALT–C 11 – 13 Sept 2012 Open participatory education and social media content groups and networks - http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/alt-c-2012-mainstreaming-grass-roots-innovation-open-educational-practice-benefits-and-chall ALT-C conference 2011: Video made for Jorum presentation. Introduction, Innovative approaches in open educational practice at UAL - http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/introduction-innovative-approaches-open-educational-practice-ual UK Sector Crowd and cloud: towards a collaborative future, 5 – 7 September 2012 Open Education in Practice. Hard and soft skills for creating open educational resources (OERs) and open content communities - http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/open-education-practice-hard-and-soft-skills-creating-open-educational-resources-oers-and-op Drawing on All Resources 16th May 2012: University of Brighton developing open educational practice in art, design and media. Recording - http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/case-study-oep-processarts-ual CONFERENCES ABROAD Aalto University in Helsinki. Finland on September 27 – 30, 2011 - Speaker - Open Experimental Spaces: ‘Exploring reuse of open educational resource in art & design practice based learning & teaching’ - Future Learning Spaces, the 7th annual Designs on E-learning 2011 conference - http://www.designsonelearning2011.com/programme Institutional presentations Learning studio workshop on digital tools and social media - http://process.arts.ac.uk/category/project-groups/learning-studio SCORE presentation 31-05-12 - video recording - http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/score-presentation-video-recording-31-05-12 UAL learning and teaching day 2012: culture and cultural capital - Culture Capital, defining digital identity & practice London College of Fashion, learning studio event 'Exploring best practice in the collaborative use of OER rich media resources in art & design practice based-learning & teaching' - http://process.arts.ac.uk/content/shared-oer-open-educational-resource-video-editing-fcp-server Conclusions Sustainable open practice has always been at the heart of my approach in exploring and developing open practice, OEP networks and environments. Supporting practice could be the biggest challenge institutions face if we do not have the sustainable OEP networks and environments to support it in place. Who are going to be the ‘open hand-holders’ of those OEP unaware and those in the early stages of OEP awareness? The most common and consistent reaction I receive in terms of progressing individuals into OEP is ‘I am totally hopeless and need some help with all this’ or ‘I am a technophobe, I really haven’t got a clue where to start, can you do this for me?’ This deficit model does not necessarily work with OEP i.e. I don’t know how to do this; so I need a course, or I can’t do this can you do it for me? OEP is not something we are socialized into at work, there are no OEP courses or rules as such and its questionable if OEP is a learnt skill or something you really have to learn through doing through practice? We can have the information out there but we really need real people out there, OEP residents who support others throughout their transition into open. If we continue with the ‘information deficit model’ without the ‘social model’ e.g building and supporting the natural development of our open participatory support networks, the progression into open practice as movement will be an uncertain one. Institutions may need to support and develop a more active and sustainable eco systems and support networks for open practice, which includes all the OEP key players unaware, aware, visitor and residents and these key players need to be identified and be involved in the agile development of the community. It was my aim to develop this system and culture on process.arts, and the SCORE section on process.arts has become a prototype support network/area for a sustainable OEP eco system, although its small, localised and subject specific there’s evidence that these OEP resource and networks are being used outside its primary subject specific context and there is a need for a general interest community around doing OEP. I will continue to develop the SCORE on process.arts area and resources as part of my day-to-day practice and try and encourage wider contributions from those moving into the space. The growth and success of process.arts is evidence for others to use and observe as a potential model for them to build their own networks. As process.arts moves into a service we will be able to develop this space by addressing outstanding bugs and development including the development of outstanding functionality. When updated the site code will be archived and we will look into the possibility of sharing this code for other to use and adapt in their own institutions. There are currently 20 plus colleges and universities represented on process.arts by individuals who have contributed content and joined general interest networks. There has been growing interest from individuals who are interested in developing a low budget/in-house process.arts style network in their institutions, many have also thought about using the current process.arts to try out the network before committing to a full local development project of their own? The first experiment of re-using process.arts code and adapting to another project is still in progress but could prove as a useful test case for others to use in future http://process.arts.ac.uk/category/tags/nam-project. Process.arts moving into a service should be seen as a major achievement for SCORE and process.arts, guaranteeing a sustainable and progressive future for the existing networks and resources developed on the site to date. We are only at the beginning of this project and there is a lot of work and development to be done. I hope the OEP community can benefit and continue to contribute to the future work and the development of sustainable open online practice (http://process.arts.ac.uk/category/tags/processarts-service). Summary The aims of the SCORE fellowship project were to gain insight and overview of the current OEP culture at UAL and across the art & design sector and then to develop understanding and resources to support future OEP within this sector from multiple perspectives including institutional, local and national. Feedback and stories through ‘doing’ open online practice The key tool used throughout the project was http://process.arts.ac.uk/. Between July 2011 and June 2012 I used process.arts as a tool to steward, support and develop open educational practice at UAL and across the wider sector through the development of subject specific content/interest communities. process.arts.ac.uk is a grass roots web2.0 open educational environment for sharing day-to-day arts practice and research of staff and students, currently provides a new ‘open learning’ space to the University of the Arts London (UAL) that straddles the institution/educational (formal learning) environment and the social (informal learning) environment. It creates an ‘experimental’ space for open educational practitioners to develop and define a new language for open edu-social practice without conforming or being influenced by pre-existing academic structures and processes. The transition of process.arts into an official UAL service will test this model and raise questions as to how institutions successfully support and develop autonomous and independent grassroots innovation without homogenising innovation. Conferences, workshops, focus groups and surveys exploring practices & attitudes I gathered feedback and data through various internal institutional systems and processes, leading discussion and debates around the issues surrounding open practices at events such as the Learning studio a face-to-face self-help workshop meetings, focus groups, consultations with staff and students, online surveys, social media networks and national and international conferences/events. I integrated project research into new and existing JISC Projects; throughout the project and was involved in the bid process, development, activities and collaboration with the following projects: UK OER Phase 2 – ALTO project & UK OER Phase 3 - ALTO UK DIAL project –JISC/UAL digital literacies project ‘Digital Integration into Arts Learning’ (DIAL) project. OEP PG Cert unit – JISC/UAL developing an CPDF Open Academic Practice Unit. Open online practice was measured in site/resource use/reuse, user attitudes and voluntary open activity. Data was gathered throughout the project, new tools and processes were tested and as a result and OEP resources, communities, stories and case studies were produced and published on process.arts http://process.arts.ac.uk/category/project-groups/score. The SCORE fellowship had a visible impact on the site activity, including user activity and engagement. The noticeable rise in users is significant in relation to the notion and process of forming and developing open practice. Process.arts moving into a service should be seen as a major achievement for SCORE and process.arts, guaranteeing a sustainable and progressive future for the existing networks and resources developed on the site to date. We are only at the beginning of this project and there is a lot of work and development to be done. I hope the OEP community can benefit and continue to contribute to the future work and the development of sustainable open online practice (http://process.arts.ac.uk/category/tags/processarts-service). SCORE Fellowship Final Report, Chris Follows Page 12 of 33

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