The internet has provided new arenas for learning in which participation and contribution have a prominent position (Drotner, 2008; Dohn, 2009 cited in Bradley, L and Vigmo, S.) providing learners and teachers alike with a plethora of opportunities for interaction which should make knowledge sharing and learning more accessible than ever before. However, the ambition shared by UNESCO in 2002 in the first global OER forum to support the sustainability of teaching globally has proved to be challenging to achieve. With the context for funding of Higher Education in the UK uncertain and the cost of studying an ever increasing burden, there has never been a more important time to support new ways of considering access to and sharing of knowledge.

Supported by a little internal funding for teaching development, a team of students and staff from different disciplines set about creating little OER (Weller, 2011) such as video tutorials and connecting institutional open practitioners in order to discover how receptive our community is to opening up education (Inamorato et al, 2016). Using open sharing through social media tools (Purvis et al, 2015) the WIHEA #knowhow project aimed to address the skills gap that exists for both teachers and learners to give wider awareness of how to locate and contribute to opportunities for learning through connecting in open digital spaces. We investigated the steps needed in order to normalise effective open practice, informed by an understanding that such practice is complex, personal and contextual (Cronin, 2017) hoping to help others work confidently in the new digital domain for scholarship.

This presentation tells the story, sharing the approach adopted and the highlights and challenges of our short but ongoing experiment. Lessons learned may help to inform an approach to the dissemination of open educational practice (OEP) in other settings. 

 

 

Bradley, R and Vigmo, S. (2016).  Pedagogical framing of OER - The case of language teaching. Open Praxis [online] vol. 8 (4), pp. 283–295. Available at https://openpraxis.org/index.php/OpenPraxis/article/view/336 [Accessed 13th Jan. 2018]. 

 

Cronin, C. (2017) Openness and Praxis: Exploring the Use of Open Educational Practices in Higher Education. IRRODL [online] Available http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/3096 [Accessed 13 Jan.2018] 

 

 

Inamorato dos Santos, A., Punie, Y., Castaño-Muñoz, J. (2016) Opening up Education: A Support Framework for Higher Education Institutions. JRC Science for Policy Report, EUR 27938 EN; doi:10.2791/293408  

 

Purvis, A et al, (2015) Experiences of Social Media in Higher Education: Barriers, Enablers and Next Steps. In #SocMedHE proceedings. [online]. Sheffield. Sheffield Hallam University. Available at: https://blogs.shu.ac.uk/socmedhe/files/2016/11/Purvis.pdf [Accessed 13^th  Jan.2018]. 

 

Weller, M. (2011). The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice. London: Bloomsbury Academic.