In Higher Ed, one thing counts
Research funding, large amounts.
I’m afraid these don’t grow on trees,
You’ve got to pick-a-pocket or two.
[Chorus]
You’ve got to pick-a-pocket or two,
If you want to fund a project or two.
We were just mulling over in an #LTHEchat the lack of investment in the UK for educational, pedagogic, Higher Education – projects, research or innovation. Since the slash to the HE budgets and introduction of higher student fees, investment through the Higher Education Academy and Jisc predominantly – through no fault of their own – has fallen from £millions to £zero. Yes. £zero. Not £small amount. But absolutely no investment for small scale projects or pieces of research at all to develop teaching and digital innovation, or simply to follow important new lines of enquiry or answer important Higher Education questions.
OK I’m all for not living lavishly, but the long-term impact of this lack of investment is going to be very far reaching. If I think of my own journey. I moved from industry to Nottingham University in 2004 and having no research track record from industry, I was up a creek without a paddle. Fortunately I discovered Flash Animation and started making learning objects for Nottingham University. This interest grew into wanting to evaluate the effectiveness of this. That is important right?
Moving onto De Montfort University and building up an interest in technology and open education, my funding profile looked OK up until 2012.
My entire research career started off with £5000. That supported five of us in the department to make some basic lab skills resources, share them on the web, write about it and go to conferences. The second piece of work looked at how to improve student writing and referencing through using Turnitin(R). It funded student and staff interviews, resulted in a publication and a few conference trips. I still talk about both these projects today.
- 2008. DMU Research Informed Teaching Award, £5000. “Virtual Analytical Laboratory – VAL”.
- 2009. DMU Teaching Quality Enhancement Fund, £1455. “Staff and student experiences of Turnitin”.
Great oaks from little acorns right?
- 2009. HEFCE OER Pilot led by HEA UK Centre for Bioscience. “Virtual Analytical Laboratory – VAL”. £16,000.
Great experience working with the HEA UK Bioscience folk. My first big externally funded open education project. VAL is still going strong today.
- 2009. HEA Teaching Development Fund. “Multimedia systematic review”, £3,000. Principal Investigator.
A significant leap for me into systematic research methodology. Have completed several reviews now and these have formed the basis of many undergraduate and postgraduate projects ever since. I run staff development workshops on systematic review now. Not bad from £3K.
This work led to my University Teaching Fellow Award. I became involved in staff mentoring and training in De Montfort at this point.
- 2010. Jisc / HEA OER Phase 2, “Sickle cell open – SCOOTER”. £123,000. Principal Investigator.
- 2011. Jisc Digitisation and Content Programme. Virtual microscope. Partner with the Open University. £5000.
- 2011. Open University SCORE Fellowship, £16,640.
- 2011. Jisc / HEA OER Phase 3, “Biology courses and OER”. £199,000. Principal Investigator.
Such a significant phase of my work. All projects still going strong. Built a strong network with the UK open education community (#ukoer) which is still alive, along with regular attendance at the UK Open Education Conference (#oer16), and four consecutive attendances at the US/Canada OpenEd Conference (#opened16), all from the research arising from this work.
These OER projects at De Montfort
- Involved hundreds of staff and students
- Built external collaborations with Leicester/Northampton hospitals
- Enhanced staff and student understanding of intellectual property and copyright
- Promoted and provided understanding of Creative Commons open licensing
- Supported staff in using technology to build learning resources
- Enhanced staff perspectives into learning design
- Promoted discovery of teaching / research expertise on the internet
- Provided lasting OER curations via WordPress blogs
- Distributed OER to global communities using social media
- I’m bored now. So much more.
Through this I became a National Teaching Fellow, mentored more fellows, sat on review panels and led more staff development. Students were involved in projects informally, through internships, through postgraduate projects and through employment as research assistants. Knowledge and research outputs were disseminated to the sector forming part of the Jisc OER Synthesis and Evaluation reports. I have had many conference presentations and papers relating to OER as a result of this work. I am now working to build open education practice in my third UK university. And with anyone else willing to listen.
- 2012. Commonwealth Fellowship. “Health promotion games for sickle cell disease”. Collaboration with University of Ibadan, Nigeria, led by Faculty of Technology Professor Howell Istance. £25,000.
- 2012. HEA Case Study. “How institutional culture can change to adopt open practices”. £2,000. Joint.
OK. Last two. The first was a Commonwealth Fellow from Nigeria who’d spotted our Sickle Cell project and wanted to produce a game to promote good health. The second was a very low-cost case study interviewing senior executive staff and completing our picture of student-staff and senior staff views on OER. These insights have been fundamental for implementation of these projects within our universities.
So without that £5K in 2008, and without working with amazing people within HEA and Jisc by which I learnt the craft of open education and a range of project management skills, I wouldn’t have achieved any of the rest. And I don’t mean that I’ve achieved grandiose promotional heights – I’m not a Professor or anything. I’ve been on the same salary scale for ten years. I mean, the impact I’ve had through working in open education, and more so, through working – or being invited to participate in:
- Learning and teaching committees/leadership groups within universities
- Contributing to learning and teaching / technology strategies for faculty/university
- Mentoring/reviewing/panel selection for university teaching fellows/national teaching fellows
- Mentoring/reviewing/panel selection for HEA UK Professional Standards Framework
- Ad hoc staff development sessions, materials and workshops
- Working with technologists
- Working with library services around Creative Commons and open education
- Nationally being on committees to support learning and teaching advocacy/practice
- Committees to support digital learning
You’ve got to pick-a-pocket or two.
So what I hear increasingly now is people self-funding, supporting old HEA or Jisc projects out of their own pocket, paying for their own conference attendance and probably more. This not just equates to folk being out of pocket, but working hours outside of their institutions.
That isn’t to say that some universities are investing in a ‘project’ type approach and in their staff, but this certainly isn’t the entire picture. Meanwhile, institutions and the sector – as the prospect of Teaching Excellence draws near and the Government want to support student choice, equality and all the other things they claim, they are going to have to think seriously how to do that. Of course the bigger problem is the skills and knowledge gap that is looming with the guts having been well and truly kicked out of anyone wishing to evaluate their teaching or digital practice, or develop a career dedicated to the development of educational research and academic development.