Online Educa tackles lifelong learning and open access

Jisc is exhibiting at the conference with the SURF Foundation, its counterpart in the Netherlands, with which it works closely in a range of areas. Among the themes being jointly promoted at the conference are e-learning, the e-Framework programme, open access and access management. Speakers from both organisations are presenting, leading workshops and conducting discussions, both formal and informal, on these areas of work over the three days of the conference.

e-Portfolios and lifelong learning

Jisc's involvement began in the morning with a presentation by programme manager Sarah Davies on Jisc's work to support lifelong learning and widening participation. Part of a one-day workshop on lifelong learning organised by the British Learning Association, the presentation looked at the wider policy context within which initiatives to promote lifelong learning in the UK are undertaken. Key to this wider context, she said, are the themes of broadening participation to non-traditional groups of learners, links with work-based learning, more flexible provision of learning, and fair and transparent admissions procedures.

Sarah Davies focused on how 'e-portfolios' - online spaces for reflecting, planning and showcasing work - can help learners make career choices and progress into hig'e-Portfolios have the potential to be a powerful learner-owned application if learners buy into and trust this idea.'her education, giving examples, such as how the Jisc-funded Enhancing Learner Progression project at Bradford University is exploring how e-portfolios can support the transition from school or college into higher education.

Another project covering Cheshire and Merseyside, run by Liverpool John Moores University, has been looking at how FE students and members of the public who are unsure about the benefits of studying in HE can be helped and supported in making applications to HE institutions in the region, Sarah reported.

She continued by exploring the main ways in which e-portfolios can support learning - by supporting applications for studies or jobs, appraisal or assessment; supporting learners as they move between institutions and sectors; and by guiding learning over time, in formal education, training and employment. 'e-Portfolios have the potential to be a powerful learner-owned application,' Sarah suggested, 'if learners buy into and trust this idea.'

Delegates heard that other challenges in this area included the need to understand more about employers and the ways in which they can be supported in accepting e-portfolios as prospective employees' records of achievement, and how tutor buy-in to any new technological development is key in its success with learners.

'The information imperative'

Earlier, Charles Jennings, Global Head of Learning at Reuters began the workshop with a discussion about what he termed the 'information imperative' - the fact there is a 30% growth in information per year and the corresponding need to adopt new systems, policies and approaches by all organisations to address this fact. One aspect of this rapid growth, said Charles Jennings, is that 'the half-life of information is getting shorter', that is to say, information which is true one day can be wrong or no longer true the following day. He spoke about the need for the skill of 'unlearning' - not necessarily knowing information but knowing how to find it only when one needs it.

'There are societal imperatives and benefits in creating national and international societies around lifelong learning', Charles Jennings continued. The workforce of the future has known nothing but the digital world, he concluded, which means that today's students are no longer the people our education system was designed to teach. The workshop's speakers, he said, were suggesting possible solutions to how the education and commercial sectors could adapt the education system to the needs of the digital age.

Stuart Jones of Becta spoke about the DfES's e-strategy, published last year, which is addressing common issues across sectors including the question of managing learner transitions across sectors, while Rob Arnsten of MyKnowledgeMap and Max Faulkner of the Open Learning Centre presented case studies of specific initiatives to promote lifelong learning in the UK.

Open access

Joint activities by Jisc and SURF began in the afternoon with a workshop on open access. Jisc Scholarly Communications consultant Fred Friend introduced the topic, saying that there were considerable economic, social and educational benefits to making research and other outputs available without financial, legal and technical barriers to access. It was also, he suggested, a question of giving more power to authors.

He outlined the two complementary routes to open access. Self-archiving or the deposit of a pre-print or post-print in an institutional or subject repository is one route, he said, while the other is publication through an open access journal. Many journals now offer an open access option through which authors pay fees out of research grants which enable their articles to be ma'There are significant economic benefits to open access too - through the sharing of developments in medical research, for example'de available free to everyone in the world.

Both routes, suggested Fred Friend, will enable the opportunities provided by technological developments, such as data mining and text mining, to be realised. New models of research dissemination are needed to match the ways in which the research process itself is changing.

There are significant economic benefits to open access too, he continued, through the sharing of developments in medical research, for example, and through the value for money gains of publicly funded research being more freely available.

For universities and colleges the benefits include the increased visibility of the work of their researchers. In addition, education institutions need to be accountable to governments and to the public at large and this increased visibility and indeed accessibility was an important aspect of their wider responsibilities. Institutions need too to provide their staff with the means to exploit technological developments and to provide them with clear guidance on copyright issues and publication options. All of these involve technical and administrative overheads but the benefits are immense, suggested Fred Friend.

One question that is repeatedly asked, he continued, is whether or to what extent the use of repository content will undermine publishers' revenue? In reply, he said that Jisc has been working closely with publishers, work which is already suggesting that publishers have an important role in the scholarly environment of the future.

Repositories

Amber Thomas, Jisc programme manager spoke about Jisc's work to encourage the establishment and development of repositories in the UK. Open access and repositories go together as issues, she suggested, as they were both about making research and other content freely available.

Jisc has been funding a range of activities, including e-prints UK, SHERPA, OpenDOAR, ROAR and many more. The recently-published Licence to Publish, jointly developed by Jisc and SURF which attempts to establish a different and fairer balance of rights and interests between authors and publishers, is another example of current work in this area and also an example of the benefits of international cooperation.

Repositories are not only of benefit to the research community, however, Amber said; they can also have clear benefits to the learning and teaching community through, for example, opening up valuable teaching content to all and through the impact of sharing good practice on improved teaching. Jorum is the Jisc-funded national repository of online learning and teaching materials which is leading the way in this area, she said.

Jisc's repositories and preservation programme began in 2006 and will continue through to 2009. While open standards are the core to getting repositories to work together on a national basis, a vital part of the programme will also be the Repository Support Project which will provide advice and support directly to institutions which are establishing and developing repositories. Echoing Fred Friend's words, she said that repositories are very much part of the open access agenda. Adding to the earlier discussion about benefits to universities, Amber said that repositories also meant that librarians can become involved in the handling of teaching materials and in clarifying copyright issues. Once again, she reiterated the main benefits that institutions stand to gain from repositories, including the major one, that of the considerable increase in the visibility of their research and other outputs to be gained through repositories.

Erik Saaman of SURF spoke about open access initiatives in the Netherlands, such as DAREnet (research), LOREnet (higher education), Edurep (non-HE) and Driver (European), and the common technical architectures which underpin them.

Ryan Hargreaves gave an overview of Jorum, the free online repository for learning and teaching resources which is aiming to create a culture of sharing of learning and teaching resources. The service is made up of two components - user and contributor services. Although launched only in January of this year, the user service has already attracted over 1600 registered users in more than 260 institutions, which represents more than a third of FE institutions and nearly two thirds of HEIs, and contains more than 2000 resources in a wide range of subjects.

John May of the SURF Foundation spoke about LOREnet which is aiming to create a similar 'community of sharing' in the use of online teaching materials in the Netherlands. LOREnet is creating a distributed structure, said John May, in contrast to the more centralised structure of Jorum.

The conference continues today and ends on Friday 1st December.

For further information, please go to Online Educa