Why make education openly accessible? Don't worry, Tom Howard will help us by explaining it's about equity and quality.
Why Make Education Openly Accessible?
The benefits of using Open Educational Resources (OER) for teaching and learning in Higher Education are well established [1]. The key benefit to learners is the unrestricted (and zero-cost) access to learning materials, regardless of age, geographic location or economic situation. There is evidence to suggest that students perform better when enrolled on courses that make more extensive use of OER too [2].
There are many benefits to HE institutions as well, the obvious one (again) relates to economics: moving away from high (and ever increasing) cost, subscription-based journals to open access alternatives is a significant cost saving. But there are other important benefits: making educational resources openly available for all can help to showcase the teaching that a University provides, and helps to promote institutional reputation.
There are also considerable benefits for teaching staff. OER can help to ease workload pressures since instructors can take existing open resources and either use them as-is, or adapt them to their own needs, rather than having to re-invent the wheel and write materials from scratch. Material created or adapted by instructors can help to promote individual reputation too.
What are we doing at Sheffield
In light of all these benefits, in December 2022, the University of Sheffield established new policy to encourage the use and creation of OER by university staff. In Engineering, we are really keen to engage with this, and it’s become one of the key themes of the Centre of Engineering Education (CEE). We believe that we can provide a unique take on it: Practical Engineering.
We’re fortunate to have the Diamond, the home of practical teaching for the Engineering Faculty. We believe that the teaching that we develop here is unique and exciting. As such, we want to share this with the wider community to showcase what we do, to promote the great work of our staff, and to enthuse prospective students by giving them an insight into what a degree in Engineering at the University of Sheffield will be like.
How are we achieving it?
We really want to see this grow, and we are promoting this across the faculty and encouraging staff to contribute as much as they can of their own work. We’re also promoting the idea of OER more generally, and encouraging staff to think about how they could use OER in their own teaching (and why it’s beneficial).
One of the key issues around OER relates to perceived quality [3]. We are (of course) confident that the resources that we create here at Sheffield are of high quality, but how do we convince others of this? Having the University Logo attached to the site helps with this, and we are fortunate to be part of an institution with a good reputation, but there is certainly more that we must do to guarantee and assure readers of the high quality of each and every resource that we share.
In academia we are very familiar with the concept of peer review, yet often in the context of OER this simply isn’t feasible [4]. There are various other techniques we can employ to help with this though. Each resource on the site includes the name of the primary author, and a link to their University profile page. Through this, viewers can view our academic credentials, to provide confidence that we are qualified to write about and teach a given subject.
Please help us!
Ultimately, the most effective way for us to demonstrate quality in our resources is through user feedback. And that’s where you come in!
The site includes a mechanism for user reviews, and we would really value any feedback that anyone may have on any of our resources. Any review is of huge value, but particularly those from other qualified authors (both internal and external to the university) would be really valuable to us.
Please browse our resources and provide us with feedback if you can. Ultimately an OER is never really final. We want to make sure our teaching is as good as it can be, and would welcome any suggested improvements. And finally, if you make use of any of our resources for your own teaching or learning then please let us know!
[1] Swain, B.K., Pathak, R.K (2024). Benefits and challenges of using oer in higher education: a pragmatic review. Discov Educ 3, 81. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-024-00142-6
[2] Kit W. Cho, Vahe Permzadian (2024). The impact of open educational resources on student achievement: A meta-analysis. International Journal of Educational Research 126. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2024.102365.
[3] Anderson, T., Gaines, A., Leachman, C., & Williamson, E. P. (2017). Faculty and Instructor Perceptions of Open Educational Resources in Engineering. The Reference Librarian 58(4), 257–277. https://doi.org/10.1080/02763877.2017.1355768.
[4] C. M. Kelty, C. S. Burrus and R. G. Baraniuk (2008). Peer Review Anew: Three Principles and a Case Study in Postpublication Quality Assurance. Proceedings of the IEEE 96(6) https://doi.org/10.1109/JPROC.2008.921613.