Digital literacies for open education

DIAL have been working closely with open education projects and developments across the university exploring the link between open practice and open digital literacies. DIAL are releasing all its resources as open educational resources (OERs).  DIAL are currently in the process of mapping the UALs 'hidden' open education landscape, during the past two years DIAL has identified many individuals practicing mostly voluntary open educational innovation across the university, see some UAL sites here.

Please see DIAL open education activity below:

• DIAL blog: Open education
• Open education at UAL year one evaluation
• Open and Flexible Learning group on process.arts
• DIAL created a 'open education at UAL' page and promoted at OER13

Below is a short reflective overview by John Casey of the work of CLTAD open education projects at UAL and their collaborative work with the DIAL project (mainly the ALTO UK project) and the emerging relationship between digital literacy and open education in general.

The ALTO UK project collaborated with the DIAL project in the events in 2012. See Category Archives: Open education (group)

1. 11th Jan CSM Focus group - links 
2. 7th July LCF OER & Copyright workshop about 15 people - links 
3. 18th Jan OER Workshop at UAL CLTAD Learning and Teaching Conference - links 
4. 29th March LCF OERs and Learning Resource Management – small focused meeting about how to manage course materials - links 
5. 8th March CSM OER Focus group (teachers full and part, critical friend, and teaching techs. Interest expressed in joint development of a drawing course) - links 
6. 13th March Chelsea Focus group - links 
7. 25th April Wimbledon College Focus group - links 

ALTO UK and DIAL contributed to the design of the UAL CLTAD Open Academic Practice Unit, PG Cert Development Strand unit.

What were we aiming to achieve?

Generating debate about the OER that addresses peoples’ fears, (mis)conceptions, and aspirations for what it might achieve and links to digital literacies.

General reflections and Current Developments

Open Educational Resources and Practices are closely related to each other, as open educational resources are only really open to those who have the digital literacy to use (and produce) them. The language surrounding both fields can be difficult to ‘outsiders’, with lots of acronyms and jargon, this is partly a result of the culture of the funding agencies in these fields who have maintained a sizeable consultant workforce who have produced what, at times can seem like a ‘closed shop’ of documentation and terminology – where the underlying concepts are in danger of being abstracted to destruction. Although done with good intentions this can and does limit the reach and impact of such short funded projects.

Looking forwards, the ALTO UK project found that the creation of OERs provides an excellent diagnostic ‘opportunity’ to identify digital literacy needs (both hard and soft) in the context of a practical environment and that it would be sensible to build such activities into staff development and student curricula. The benefits of this would be to develop embedded understanding of digital literacies/fluencies amongst students and staff and help participants better understand premise of their professional digital ‘trace’ and consequent profile. At UAL a policy proposal that would include measures to link open education and digital literacies in such a way (working title Open UAL) is being discussed by senior management, this is directly based on the experience of the ALTO UK and DIAL projects.

Read more about the Open Scholarship Policy – Discussion Document