Mind the Gap: Structural Holes, Open Educational Practices and the Third Sector [1516] Home : #OER17

Public Group Active 7 years, 8 months ago

Wed, Apr 5 2017, 1:30pm – 2:50pm

Authors: Ronald MacIntyre, and Pete Cannell

Room: Seminar 3

Theme: Policy & Practice

Type: Presentations

Description

Open Educational Practices Scotland is a three-year programme supported by the Scottish Funding Council and hosted by the Open University in Scotland. It looks to build capacity and raise awareness of the design, production and use of free open online educational content across sectors. Our focus on addressing inequities in access has meant that we often find ourselves working with Third Sector organisations. Our prior experience as practitioners in widening participation suggests the most effective way to create routes into learning is partnerships with organisations who can act as “trusted sources” of support for those distanced from education (Cannell et.al 2015). Over the last few decades the Third Sector has become a key part of the political economy, developing from advocacy to service delivery. These organisations often developed as a way to fill structural holes left my “Market Failure”, and increasingly “State Failure”. As such their developing interest in Open Educational Practices (OEP) is suggestive and warrants further exploration. This paper explores our work in this area.

We have worked with Parkinson’s UK to develop, a small badged open course to raise awareness of Parkinson’s amongst front line health and social care staff, and then a post graduate level short badged course on palliative care. With the former Parkinson’s UK wanted to address the educational needs of a group who are on cares “front line”, but last in line when it comes to training. In the latter, Parkinson’s UK wanted to intervene with more senior members to provide relevant curriculum in an area where they felt health providers and the academy were failing. Through OER they hoped to inform the development of CPD and accredited programmes, with the ultimate goal always concerned with improving the care of those with Parkinson’s.

Our engagement with OEP is also concerned with use. For example, our work with Scottish Union Learning (Cannell and Macintyre 2017) has focussed on socialising learning. Drawing on older traditions of social support for those distanced from learning and Trade Union collective values we have explored and developed models to support the use of OER. More recently in our work with Unite the Union and the Poverty Alliance in Scotland we have been looking at how to curate learning journeys. We will report on these initiatives and insights from research we have been doing with the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisation into sector wider approaches to OER and OEP.

Third Sector are “minding the gap”, we share our reflections on those gaps and how they have arisen. We also share what we have learnt about WP from Third Sector partnerships, unlike most HE their learners or clients are not competing for access or being competed for, they are not orientated towards learning at all. Just as assumptions about learning shapes openness in HE (Macintyre 2016), this shapes their approach to open. It is our sense there are important lessons for HE as it looks to live up to the early promise of open to promote equity and social justice.

References

Cannell, P., Macintyre, R. and Hewitt, L. (2015) Widening access and OER: developing new practice, Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning, 17, 1: 64-72.

Cannell, P. and Macintyre, R. (2017) Free open online resources in workplace and community settings – a case study on overcoming barriers, Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning, in press

Macintyre, R. (2016). Open Education and the Hidden Tariff. In: OEGlobal 2016: Convergence through Collaboration, 12th-14th of April, Krakow, Poland.

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