Open Scotland @10

Reflecting on the open education landscape in Scotland and looking to the future.

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Open Scotland is a cross sector initiative that aims to raise awareness of open education, encourage the sharing of open educational resources, and explore the potential of open policy and practice to benefit all sectors of Scottish education.

openscot.net

Open Scotland Summit

• Brought together senior managers, policy makers and key thinkers to explore the development of open education policy and practice in Scotland.
• National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, June 2013.

Scottish Open Education Declaration https://declaration.openscot.net/

Creative Commons State of the Commons 2014 https://web.archive.org/web/20141222020055/https://stateof.creativecommons.org/

OpenMed https://openmedproject.eu/

OER World Congress, CC BY, Slovenian Press Agency

2015 Response from Scottish Government

“The Open Education Declaration and its aim at implementing wider and more equitable access to education and to lead the way in Europe is a noble initiative with potential to enhance diversity as well as many of our key aims, including widening access to education through free access to high quality education and to redraw traditional boundaries between informal and formal learning.”

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“As well as the OEPs project, SFC also funds Jisc which supports the development and use of Open Educational Resources through platforms, repositories, and projects…Scottish Government’s funding represents a demonstration of our commitment to helping support Open Education going forward.” 

2021 Response from Scottish Government

Repeated Themes in Govt Correspondence

1. Open Education = Open University X
2. Open Education is nothing to do with us X
3. Open Education is a service that we’d ask you to sell to 32 local authorities X

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1. “ Open education and the sharing of learning materials is something that is in the philanthropic gift of Universities in Scotland “ X

https://openscot.net/

False Starts?

Jorum - UK retired on 30 September 2016 - replaced briefly by JiscStore

CDN - Resource Share - Scottish FE - retired at same time

Still going but not open content -

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Open Educational Resources (OER) Wales: This initiative provides free access to a range of teaching resources for teachers in Wales. The resources cover a range of subjects and are suitable for primary, secondary, and further education - influential but dead

Teaching resources - Tes - really marketplace

Institutional responses/ school/ college

Schools UK

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Resources - Hwb (gov.wales) National repository

Digital learning from Comhairle Nan Eilean Siar | e-Sgoil Online courses but not many materials

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College - no national initiatives in Scotland

City of Glasgow College - Learning and Teaching Academy

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Green Shoots - hard to see

UK Wide - started pilot - Jisc/UfiTrust/OU

VocTeach - Blended learning, content discovery and curation in UK FE.

SQA -

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Glow (schools) - closed intranet little sharing

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Return to old closed collaborative models

Green Shoots - hard to see

In partnership with providers

ClickView

Using free platforms

Google Sites / YouTube

Using Resources to hand

Using an Open Moodle

Canvas Net and Canvas Commons

Officially but with GDPR and Accessibility Risks - Learning Wheel

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Colleges and Schools

• Don’t have repositories or platforms generally to share out with their organisations.
• Have not got guidance on open licensing or sharing of learning materials. ( contracts of employment can be barrier)
• As organisations become more porous can be caught up in College/ school/local authority marketing and communication channels - not place for open learning and teaching materials. Marcomms teams don’t understand open licensing or open educational resources.
• Troubled policy landscape as SQA and Education face reforms
• Community of practice Colleges/Schools around OER does not exist low grassroots awareness - librarians aware of open textbooks !

What does the future hold for open education in Scotland?

This presentation is licensed CC BY 4.0 Lorna M. Campbell & Joe Wilson, 2023.