The OpenSpires project (http://openspires.oucs.ox.ac.uk) at Oxford is about making recordings of talks and lectures available for free in a sustainable way.
Now 280 recordings – approximately 160 hours – with over 130 academics contributing lectures and items. OpenSpires built on the success of using iTunesU (http://itunes.ox.ac.uk) to make podcasts available – over 1630 items, with >3 million downloads – licensed for personal use only – so not OERs in terms of institutional perspective.
Nice quote from a contributor noting with amazement that their lecture on philosophy being downloaded 18,000 times per week – my paraphrasing: “so I knew being ‘number one’ meant more than 20 downloads a week, but I’d no idea beyond that”
They’ve supported a ‘devolved’ model for contributions – departments can provide audio/video recordings to the central service – who can deal with legal stuff etc. Then the central service can ‘gap fill’.
Creative Commons gave a way of licensing material.
Benefits to the institution:
- Accessibility
- Outreach
- Use of technology that reflects what is unique about Oxford
- High calibre material of global importance
- Fits with institutional strategic mission
Tried to make sure that the amount of extra time needed from academic/lecturer is minimal – shouldn’t be more effort than giving the talk in the first place.
Syndication using RSS – makes it very easy to distribute and enables reuse. (potential) types of reuse:
- Website widge
- Institutional portal
- National portal
- VLE/CLE
- Subject centres
Communities add value – e.g. translating content into different languages.
Now getting academics to share experience – interesting to note the experience is about individuals appreciating it – fanmail etc. – not other institutions/academics using it? Does this matter?
One academic suggested a change to iTunesU contract – and got it accepted – the part in brackets below:
2.1 The Content. University hereby grants to Apple a nonexclusive, royalty-free right and license to use, reproduce, modify the format and display of Content (not the substance of any Content) …
He says – read contracts before you sign them, and make amendments if necessary! (parallels to the need for academics to look at the rights they sign away to publishers of research)
Q & A and comments from floor:
Q: What about institutional reuse as opposed to individual consumption – and also use of non-commercial for licensing
A: Early days – proved interest, excited to see how others may join together content into ‘courses’. Despite licensing people don’t really seem to have yet realised that the licenses really really mean that you can use this stuff!
Comment: Sustainability will only come as we change our attitudes towards teaching and value it as it should be.
Comment: In medicine a lot of content can’t be published as patients involved and they are happy for material to be used in medical education but not more generally.
Comment: Making available as a podcast allows students to ‘timeshift’ lectures – some worry that this will lead to students not coming to lectures (although commenter not convinced this is a problem)