Opening Educational Practices in ScotlandExploring Value and Values through

Openness: Third Sector Partnerships approach to free open online Education as a Public Good

Ronald Macintyre & Claire Hewitt@roughbounds@ParkinsonsUK@OEPScotland #OEPS

Cite as: Macintyre R., Hewitt C. (2017) Exploring Value and Values through Openness: Third Sector Partnerships approach to free open online Education as a Public Good, 2nd International Public and Political Leadership Conference: Leadership for Public and Social Value, 6th -7th of April 2017, Milton Keynes, CC BY NC SA 4.0

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Opening Educational Practices in Scotland

Session(s) Structure• Introduction to Parkinson’s UK • Introduction to OEPS and OER and OEP• Designing for Openness• Reflections on our Practice• Openness, technology and change• Reflecting on Value(s)• Conclusions and Questions

Opening Educational Practices in Scotland

Parkinson’s UK• Organisational values• Strategic review and 5 year strategy• New education service

Opening Educational Practices in Scotland

Parkinson’s UK• Why engage with digital education?• What drove this change?• How does this meet our values?

Opening Educational Practices in Scotland

What do we mean by OEP?We think of Open Educational Practices as those educational practices that are concerned with and promote equity and openness. Our understanding of ‘open’ builds on the freedoms associated with “the 5 Rs” of OER, promoting a broader sense of open, emphasising social justice, and developing practices that open up opportunities for those distanced from education.

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Opening Educational Practices in Scotland

Designing for OpennessWhy Designerly ways …

Openness has a problem, the promise of democratising learning is not being realised, tendency to make open in the image of the academy

Tendency to treat open as a technical question has led to technical solutions relating to platforms and licences

Designerly ways emphasise starting with peoples needs and provide a framework for exploring and structuring those inquiries

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Opening Educational Practices in Scotland

For example:

Exploring Learning Journeys: Exercise 1• The ideal learner tells us a great deal

about the resources and capabilities of the organisation – it is often what they are good at delivering

• The actual learner also tells us a great deal about the resources and capabilities

• [often] both highlight the limits of our knowledge about learners needs and wants

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Opening Educational Practices in Scotland

Designing for Openness

Need to “know” your learners, but it is more than a simple customer/consumer relationship

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Opening Educational Practices in Scotland

Designing for Openness

Past mistakes: earlier iterations we had focussed on how, but not attending to implications for change, or the relationship to organisational values

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Opening Educational Practices in Scotland

Designing for Openness

Accept the value even when you have tried to account for the value for the learner, the value is learning comes into being when enacted, it is uncertain.

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Opening Educational Practices in Scotland

Reflections on our Practice

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Opening Educational Practices in Scotland

Reflections on our Practice

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Opening Educational Practices in Scotland

Reflections on our PracticeInterview ThemesTake care over the course because they care about people, course has high retention;

Seeing things in new ways – better advocates, but not always recognised;

Asking difficult questions about local support

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Opening Educational Practices in Scotland

Openness Technology and Change

Lets not pretend its neat. •You can use open online to reach people, but … •Open online can be used strategically to colonise a public space discourse – go to places

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Opening Educational Practices in Scotland

Openness Technology and Change

Lets not pretend its easy•Blurring the boundaries around an organisation creates tensions at operational level •Partnership asks questions at a strategic level, organisation sense of self as site of knowledge

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Opening Educational Practices in Scotland

Reflection on Value(s)• For values based organisations values inform

“the way we do things around here”• This means applying models with assumptions

of about value (e.g. shareholder), or the nature of the “customer” interactions might not be appropriate

• Design based approaches need to be applied with care, they have their own assumptions, esp. about needs

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Opening Educational Practices in Scotland

Reflection on Value(s)• Is this really about “Public Value”, as

sometimes Third Sector organisations act as spaces of resistance to dominant/ing discourses

• The “way we do things around here”, occupies inbetween spaces, and might be read as a map of structural holes and value failures

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Opening Educational Practices in Scotland

Concluding Remarks …

Opening Educational Practices in Scotland

Questions

Opening Educational Practices in Scotland

POSTSCRIPT

Opening Educational Practices in Scotland

Emerging Patterns and Practices

Growing Interest from values based organisations in free open online

Agree Disagree

Participants were asked to place a dot on an imaginary line between the two positions at the SCVO event “The Gathering”, the largest Third Sector event in Europe, (n=52)

Opening Educational Practices in Scotland

Emerging Patterns and Practices

Concerns

Agree Disagree

Participants were asked to place a dot on an imaginary line between the two positions at the SCVO event “The Gathering”, the largest Third Sector event in Europe, (n=52)

Opening Educational Practices in Scotland

Emerging Patterns and Practices

Concerns

Agree Disagree

Participants were asked to place a dot on an imaginary line between the two positions at the SCVO event “The Gathering”, the largest Third Sector event in Europe, (n=52)