Inside Out: Linking OERs to professional development and knowledge management activities

The ALTO team are presenting two papers at the Manchester OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES 2011 conference. http://www.ucel.ac.uk/oer11/

OER1122 Oral Presentation ppt

Thursday 12 May 12.00 Cockcroft Theatre

Inside Out: Linking OERs to professional development and knowledge management activities

John Casey, Hywell Davies, Chris Follows, Nancy Turner & Ed Webb-Ingall, University of the Arts London

Conference Theme: Academic practice and digital scholarship

Abstract: The ALTO (Arts Learning & Teaching Online) project at the University of the Arts London has as one of its high level aims to link engagement with OER publishing activity to a process of educational culture change across the institution. This presentation describes the journey that the project team has taken to address this aim and some of the emerging outcomes, which may be of use across the HE sector. Along the way the team have had to seek answer to some tricky questions like:

• Whose culture?
• What changes?
• Why change?
• How to change?

Early on in the project discussions we decided to focus on the ‘why?’ question in relation to OER creation and sharing with the hope that everything else would make sense from there. This helped us to come to some useful conclusions about why we should engage with OER creation and sharing and also offered further areas to explore that include:

• OER engagement and creation can be seen as an institutional and professional development tool in the context of externalising practice, pedagogic conceptions and strategies to support reflection and development.
• a foundation to introduce and extend collaborative learning design skills in staff in support greater flexible and blended learning opportunities for future students in order to extend the range of study modes and options at the UAL – a real challenge for such practice based subjects.
• Demonstrate the use of OERs as 'boundary objects' as described in the work of Etienne Wenger’s Communities of Practice and as ‘mediating artefacts’ in learning design advocated by Grainne Conole of the Open University to facilitate communication and collaboration between different groups of practitioners
• Explore the possibility of this overall approach and methodology combined with repository and social media tools to provide the basis for a viable knowledge capture and management system

Keywords: open educational resources; professional development; pedagogy; educational development; learning design; knowledge capture; knowledge management; blended learning; flexible learning; repository; social media

References:

Arts Learning & Teaching Online Available at: http://www.arts.ac.uk/alto/

Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Conole, G. (2008). Capturing practice: the role of mediating artefacts in learning design. In Lockyer L., S. Bennett, S., Agostinho, and B Harper (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Learning Design and Learning Objects: Issues, Applications and Technologies. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_management