The Ed Techie

Two OER sites for researchers

I've been involved very peripherally with a project funded through SCORE, and led by my colleague Robin Goodfellow. The aim was to develop two sites, one aimed at overseas postgrads coming to the UK to conduct research study. This site gives advice on matters such as research methods and writing for academic purpose. It is at http://www.readytoresearch.ac.uk/

The other site is aimed more at UK undergraduates and looks at digital literacy, digital scholarship type issues, so addresses topics such as learning with social media, plagiarism, collaborating online. It can be found at: http://www.digitalscholarship.ac.uk/

The interesting thing about the project was that the brief was to build it using only OERs as content. This led to quite a bit of agonising about what constituted an OER, for instance did it need to have an explicit reuse licence attached? In the end we have opted for CC licensed, good quality OERs where we can, but occassionally had to opt for a different resource.

The role of the team then was to find and select appropriate resources then. We didn't want a site that provided an exhaustive list of all possible resources, but rather one that deliberately selected what we thought were the best ones. This reinstigation of a filter, after it has been removed from the publishing stage, is a potentially significant role for higher education I think.

While it was probably quicker to find, select and describe resources and then coordinate a nice site around them than it was to produce them all from scratch, it wasn't that quick. But I do think the overall quality is better as a result and this may be the better selling point for OERs. There is an obvious analogy with teaching here - we could have just as easily been creating a course in these subject areas. 

Anyway, I hope you find them useful and can maybe think of some people to pass them on to.

Innovating Pedagogy report

Here at IET in the OU, a bunch of us, led by Mike Sharples, were asked to produce an annual report on how changes in teaching and learning (related to technology) were changing the current landscape. The initial idea was to do this for senior OU management, but I'm pleased to say that everyone involved wanted to make it wider than that and create a publicly available report. Think of it as like a Horizon's report with more focus on pedagogy. We adopted the same methodology as the Horizon report also.

It does have a bit of an OU bias, but I think it's a very good read (and I should know as I had to read through it multiple times for editing) for anyone in higher ed (a lot of it is applicable across other sectors, but we're upfront in saying these are not our areas of expertise). It's meant to do so in a short, accessible format, so for instance the (inevitable) coverage of MOOCs probably won't add much to you if you've been following them in detail, but then again you may find the stuff on Personal Inquiry Learning is new to you.

It's billed as a "New report from the Open University on ten innovations in teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world". It covers ten such innovations, some of which won't be a surprise to readers of this blog. They are:

• Assessment for learning
• Badges to accredit learning
• Learning analytics
• MOOCs
• New pedagogy for e-books
• Personal inquiry learning
• Publisher led mini-courses
• Rebirth of academic publishing
• Rhizomatic learning
• Seamless learning

You can read the full, nicely formatted, pretty pictured, report here, and make comments on any of the topics on the accompanying blog.

The intention is that it is an annual report, so we'll revisit next year. In the meantime, I hope you find something useful in it, and it might be the type of thing you can leave lying around on the desk of a senior management type person.

 

The inclusions & cold flows of the Finch report

In this post I shall attempt to use aluminium pressure die casting as a metaphor for what I perceive as the defects in the recent Finch Report on Open Access publishing. I know what you're thinking, "not another aluminium die-casting as metaphor for open access post, I've read ten of those this week".

Here goes then - when making aluminium pressure die casts, molten aluminium is forced into a mould at high velocity and pressure. There are a number of defects that can occur, and two of these are analogous to the problems I see with the Finch report.

I should start by saying I think the Finch team did a very thorough job, and that have the genuine, honorable aim of increasing access to research publications. Their report is very well researched and the conclusions they come to are sensible and based on sound analysis. I recommend reading the report in full if you're interested in open access publishing as it does an excellent job of pulling together many different strands and setting out the context.

But, I have some niggles. These fall in to broadly two categories, which are analagous to my die casting defects.

The first is the 'cold flow' type defect. In die casting a cold flow occurs when the metal begins to cool too quickly, either because it wasn't hot enough to start with, or it was injected too slowly, or the design of the mould restricts flow. You get big unsightly swirls, which can also weaken the structure. 

The Finch report cold flows are where they have been too cautious in my opinion. They are injecting open access too slowly into the system, allowing it to cool and congeal around key points.

Cold Flow 1: Lack of support for repositories

The report acknowledges that some repositories such as arXiv have been successful but concludes they are not a viable model on their own, stating that there is a:

"widespread acknowledgement that repositories on their own do not provide a sustainable basis for a research communications system that seeks to provide access to quality-assured content; for they do not themselves provide any arrangements for pre-publication peer review. 
Rather, they rely on a supply of published material that has been subject to peer review by others; or in some cases they provide facilities for comments and ratings by readers that may constitute a more informal system of peer review once the material has been deposited and disseminated via the repository itself"

I'm not sure I agree with this, and if you are proposing a national initiative then certainly there is room for a repository. Their suggestion to move to Gold Open Access means that effectively the tax-payer will be funding publishers, since the money will come from research bodies. If you're going to plowing this money in then you have the opportunity to rethink approaches. So we could set up a national, interdisciplinary arXiv. With possible post-filter (eg using my metajournal approach). That would be an innovative thing to do.

Cold Flow 2: Lack of demand on publishers

As I said above, the model they propose will mean the government effectively funds the publishing process. If you're going to be doing that, then you should make sure you get value for money. So instead of suggesting that it would be good for publishers to link data with publications, eg:

"In an ideal world, there would be closer integration between the text and the data presented in journal articles, with seamless links to interactive datasets; a consequent fall in the amount of supplementary material; and two-way links, with interactive viewers, between publications and relevant data held in data archives. The availability of, and access to, publications and associated data would then become fully integrated and seamless, with both feeding off each other."

Perhaps they should mandate it? And offer an alternative, for instance, they could fund universities directly to publish OA journals, where you get the 'basic' package, or if you have publishers then this is the value they add. Without mandating what you are requiring for your money, you create cold flows as people figure what they can get away with.

The second type of defect I see in the report is analagous to inclusions. In die casting the presence of foreign particles (typically Aluminium Oxide) is known as an inclusion and can be very damaging to the overall strength of the casting. As the aluminium cools around these particles, it will create a weak spot, which can potentially fracture.

The Finch report has one large inclusion in it that I think creates just such a weak spot. It is the role of the publishers. I know a few people in publishing, and they're good people generally who want to work with academics and believe in the research dissemination process. So this isn't an anti-publisher rant. But in a talk I attended from the Finch team and in the report, I got the impression that the economic viability of the academic publishing industry was a key objective. For example, the report states:

"arrangements must be in place to enable publishers (whether they are in the commercial or the not-for-profit sector) to meet the legitimate costs of peer review, production, and marketing, as well as high standards of presentation, discoverability and navigation, together with the kinds of linking and enrichment of texts (‘semantic publishing’) that researchers and other readers increasingly expect. Publishers also need to generate surpluses for investment in innovation and new services; for distribution as profits to shareholders;"

Generating profits for publishers can be a side effect (as it was in pre-internet days), but it cannot be a goal. The goal is to effectively disseminate research. That is all. 

The danger of this inclusion is that it creates an economically unviable model, where much of the money flows to shareholders, or creating systems that gain competitive advantage. Neither of these are concerns for disseminating research. A Deutsche bank report (cited in McGuigan and Russell) stated that:

"We believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process. We are not attempting to dismiss what 7,000 people at the publishers do for a living. We are simply observing that if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn't be available."

The conclusion of the Finch report does nothing to address this, and indeed could make the situation worse. It also loses an opportunity to think of more radical methods through which that principle aim of disseminating research might be achieved, because the stability of the existing approach is assumed.

I won't try and make connections to other die casting defects such as porosity. I'll leave it there, but you should read Stephen Harnad's piece on the Finch report, which makes up for what it lacks in tenuous die-casting metaphors by being excellent.

 

How to dismantle a sector

I'm not an overtly political animal, unlike many of my colleagues, so maybe this post is misguided or misinformed, but increasingly working in Higher Ed in the UK feels like working in a beleagured sector. Many people will feel like this in the current crisis, so higher ed is no different in that respect, but it now feels like it is not only suffering the same fate as all sectors, but is actually the victim of an ongoing campaign. I sit in many meetings with colleagues, in this university and across the sector, where we end up shaking our heads and laughing with a mixture of amazement and hysteria at the next cumbersome plan that is being foisted upon us.

As I said, I'm not that political, so maybe I've got some of the following wrong, in which case, please correct me. But here is how I interpret the last few years, and some supposition about the next few:

• The student loan scheme is forced through, and the coalition seems to have not considered the scenario that most universities will charge the top rate of £9000.
• The scheme then turns out to be more costly to realise than the existing method.
• In a panic, the government then introduces Student Number Control, so that it can cap the number of loans it gives out and can ringfence that money.
• As I understand it, the situation with part-time students is too complex at the moment (when is a student studying, or in-between studies, what counts as a full time equivalent, etc), so they have avoided student number control at the moment. But it will probably come in to play for 2014.
• However, because it will look politically damaging to allow students to 'buy' their way on to courses, the student control figure will apply, regardless of whether the students are taking out loans or not. Universities could then find themselves in the position of turning away students who have the money to study and who they have the capacity to teach.
• The student control numbers however, do not apply to new private universities because they want to grow that sector.

WonkHE has a lot more insightful stuff on student number control if you want to dig down into it.

And this is avoiding looking at the situation with research. The higher education sector in the UK was a widely respected, profitable and functioning system. It was by no means perfect and certainly wasn't efficient, but it worked. I appreciate it worked because it was funded to an extent by the UK taxpayer, but even in hard economic terms, this shift from Government debt to private debt doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Not all debt is equal - Government debt can be long term and at low interest rates. Private debt creates a liquidity trap in times of economic crisis, because individuals seek to reduce their debt and thus don't contribute to growth, thereby creating more debt. And a nation's debt is best measured by combining Government debt, financial institutional debt, and personal debt. Shifting it to individuals then doesn't reduce the overall debt, it just increases the damage it does to your economic outlook.

Socially it's a poor idea too, in times of crisis society undergoes a seismic shift - people lose jobs in one sector, but retrain, re-educate and create a new one. But if they can't afford to study (or are put off by the austerity rhetoric) then this shift doesn't take place, or is at least limited. 

This may sound like special pleading - "we should be immune from the winds that batter the economy because we have nice beards" - but it isn't. Like many people in the sector, I expected and accepted that higher education would go through a period of increased accountability and efficiency. We weren't prepared though for this sustained assault, combined with a dangerous level of incompetence. 

And all this when you want to shift to being a knowledge economy - strange times indeed.

 

Comparing the value of education

I've signed up to study the OU's MA in History starting in September. My reasons for this are twofold: it's good to be a student every now and then to remember what it's like to be a 'real' student; and I have this notion that part of what I do on this blog and in my digital scholarship book is to act like a contempary historian. I am trying to document, predict, analyse, and generally make-it-up-as-I-go-along this particular period of change for scholarly practice, because I feel that it's a significant one. But I don't have the real theoretical or methodological underpinning from a historical perspective to do this. 

I'm lucky, I get my fees paid as an employee of the University (rather like the mythical island where everyone makes a living taking in their neighbour's washing, maybe the OU can just populate its courses with its own staff). But completing the fee waiver form made me think about the (purely financial) cost of studying, and how it compared. Now, I believe education should be free, it's a general benefit to society to have people studying, so this isn't a political post about education funding, instead just looking at how it compares with other family spends.

As a leisure activity it is at the higher end, but doesn't come out too bad. My course is £3120 for the first part (which lasts a whopping 16 months), and then £1560 for the second which lasts 9 months. So that's a good couple of years of high quality activity (it actually comes to 2.5 with a small break in between and some pre-course work).

Here are some other leisure costs for comparison over the same period:

• Full season ticket at Spurs: about £4000 (would be 2.5 seasons)
• Average family holiday: £7,800 (2 family holidays)
• Gardening: £700 

So it's definitely a luxury 'product' but not excessively so. It doesn't compete then on price as a luxury activity. What does it compete on? I'd suggest it has the following advantages:

• Longevity - a post or undergrad degree will teach you techniques and you'll gain knowledge that will stay with you forever. On the first day of my Psychology degree back in 1986 they told us "long after you've forgotten all the stuff we teach you, you'll remember how to be a scientist". And they were right. You may retain memories of a good holiday or football season, but the longevity of good education is hard to beat.
• Self-worth - I think an adventure holiday or growing a beautiful garden provide this too, but there is something about the objective value of a degree or masters qualification. You have achieved something that is broadly recognised and even for a Prof, that has a value to one's sense of self-worth. The sense of having been challenged and achieved something (much like running) gives a sense of purpose that is difficult to find elsewhere, outside of physical, sporting challenges.
• Identity - being a football fan can add a lot to a sense of identity and people often label themselves in such terms, but so does acquiring a degree. I don't know if I'll label myself a historian afterwards, but it will definitely be a component.
• Job prospects - this depends on the qualification, and increasingly is less significant than it used to be when everyone has a degree. It probably won't count much in my case, but who knows, it could lead to interesting career directions, research projects, etc. But certainly this is something holidays and footie tickets can't claim.
• Enjoyment - I can't say how much it compares with a good family holiday or a great footie season, or a carefully cultivated garden. All of these provide enjoyment, but that is their principle sales pitch. I feel the joy you find in becoming part of an academic community, of learning interesting stuff for its own sake is something we don't make enough of in education.

In making this comparison though I think I've highlighted the problem in making education a market commodity. If you look at that list above of the virtues education offers, aside from job prospects, it is almost impossible to value them in monetary terms. How much is improved self worth in cash terms? To ask the question is to see it as ridiculous.