HumBox - Sharing made simple

Brett Lucas is the Website
Developer and Learning
Technologist at the English
Subject Centre.
He is the co-ordinator of the
HumBox marketing and
dissemination strategy and
is also managing the three
English projects within the
consortium.

***Stop press: The URL for Humbox is now http://www.humbox.ac.uk Going live to the world on Friday 26 February, 2010

The English Subject Centre is part of a consortium of four Humanities Subject Centres working with partners in 12 different institutions on a pilot project to build a collection of freely available teaching materials called HumBox www.humbox.ac.uk. Quite simply, ’Open Educational Resources’, or OERs, are teaching materials released into the public domain making them free for public or educational use as long as the original author is acknowledged (Millard, 2009). This project fo
rms a part of a much larger HEFCE programme which aims to make available a wealth of teaching materials from across the HE sector. This article tells the story of HumBox and its significance for English studies while also providing the broader context of where we are now with OERs and e-learning.

HumBox will be an easy way for humanities lecturers to share resources developed for teaching. You’ll be able to upload things like handouts, seminar activities, lecture slides and assignments and download and adapt resources others have deposited. It’s all about sharing ideas, approaches and resources and saving time.

‘This is the first time that a project of this nature will have been undertaken on this scale, collaboratively across an entire national educational sector.’
Malcolm Read – Head of JISC

Background

The most often used definition for the term OER is: ‘digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching and learning and research’ (OECD, 2007). The concept of ’openness’ is based on the idea that knowledge should be disseminated and shared freely through the Internet for the benefit of society as a whole (Yuan. L et al, 2008).

Over the past 10 years, teaching materials have increasingly migrated to digital formats.(1) From the simple websites of the late 1990s, today’s course websites have become dynamic interactive spaces within Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) where students share thoughts and answer questions on discussion boards or blogs, access and analyse critical readings before or after their lectures and seminars, update their personal learning journals, do exercises related to relevant research archives, watch videos from public and educational sites and even listen to audio podcasts of lectures or audio feedback on their essays. The learning environments we are creating for our students have changed radically. At the same time, more and more students are supplementing – or replacing – lectures, seminars and course materials with resources they uncover on the web (Katz, 2008).

Forward-thinking lecturers are fostering links with new learning communities beyond the walls of institutions and looking at ways in which teaching materials can be broken up into smaller discrete and more flexible ’chunks of learning’, delivered at different times and in different configurations than traditional campus-based models. New modes of course delivery also enable literature, language and Creative Writing departments to redefine and therefore increase their potential student numbers more economically. Fully online undergraduate and postgraduate degrees delivered to worldwide audiences, summer courses, franchised modules sold to the business sector and community spaces within social networks for new students are just some which I have witnessed in the past year.

Online course development takes time

Despite the rapid rise in the number of so-called ’hybrid’ or blended and fully online courses and the satisfaction students get from engaging with these various modes of teaching, it still takes considerable time, commitment and dedication to develop good online course materials that contain a variety of tasks, activities, well-researched links, podcasts and videos. The necessary time commitment is the reason cited by many lecturers for not doing it at all. A 2005 survey of English e-learning practitioners captures the mood well: ‘sometimes there’s a prohibitive workload involved in preparing and uploading materials ... the labour can seem disproportionate to the learning context it is geared to support’ (E-learning Practitioner Survey in English Studies, 2005).

However, there are more factors than lack of time that are slowing the development of good-quality, flexible e-learning materials. There is still little reward in the academy for their development. It can be a struggle to find inspiration and ideas from within the discipline and sometimes it is simply not possible to produce the resources you really desire given copyright issues, technical restraints or institutional barriers.

The HumBox project plans to change that. In the pilot phase, we are collecting over 400 resources from the Humanities and, in the process of turning them into OERs, we are investigating solutions to the issues cited above with the aim of creating a community of practitioners committed to ’open’ sharing and reuse.

Openness is not a new concept

Making learning resources openly available is not a new concept, developing from the public library movement of the 19th century to the Open Source Software developments in the 1990s.

In the mid-1990s, relatively simple learning objects were made available informally, as instructors shared syllabi, lesson plans and learning activities. Later, more complex and/or topic-specific repositories came into existence as museums, journals and magazines, educational television and other organisations placed content on the web and encouraged it to be used for educational purposes (Smith Nash, 2005).
Different kinds of collections are beginning to emerge, some with a centralised approach. Massachusetts Institute of Technology were pioneers in the educational field with their OpenCourseWare initiative (http://tinyurl.com/2t2rfj) which puts entire courses online (1,900 courses and counting), including reading lists, lecture notes, videos and syllabi. The UK’s Open University joined in with OpenLearn (http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/) (with 5,000 hours of tuition) and its sister website LabSpace (http://labspace.open.ac.uk/) that allows users to repurpose courses to suit their contexts then re-upload them for others to share. These models take considerable investment in time and money.

Other collections focus on one particular format and are community driven. iTunes U, for example, allows institutions to create a branded interface to audio and video podcasts of courses as well as interviews and presentations. Public sites like YouTube and Videojug (videos), Flickr (photos) and SlideShare (presentations) provide a myriad of teaching materials that can be linked to or embedded in course websites. The UK’s national collection of learning materials for FE and HE – Jorum – was launched in 2005 and has a small collection of Humanities resources (www.jorum.ac.uk). A new JorumOpen service will be relaunched in 2010, with all the outputs of the UKOER programme.

Are we ready to share?

In 2005, an English Subject Centre project (Masterman and Lee, 2005) investigated attitudes to sharing of learning materials among staff and postgraduates in three different English departments and found that:

• The majority of tutors reuse learning materials created by others between 5% and 50% of the time
• The learning materials that are most reused are primary texts, secondary research texts, images and reading lists
• Although Internet search engines and websites are widely used in sourcing materials for possible reuse, personal acquaintance plays an important role
• The overwhelming majority of respondents were prepared to make some or all of their learning materials available for use by others inside and/or outside their home institutions

The principal barriers to the sharing of learning materials include pragmatic issues (teaching material is contextualised to the class and tutor) and individual’s concerns that the materials are not fully representative of their teaching and scholarship abilities. HumBox will take the experience and research carried out on OERs both within the subject and the wider community to create a humanities community collection that builds on a sustainable practitioner-led model.

Introducing the HumBox project

The HumBox project aims to publish a bank of good-quality humanities resources online for free download and sharing,
and, in so doing, create a community of humanities specialists who are willing to share their teaching materials and collaborate
with others to peer review and enhance existing resources.
(See screenshot of an example resource on this page.)
HumBox will enhance the variety of resources available to students and thus promote international interest in the study
of Humanities disciplines in UK higher education. A full list of objectives can be viewed on our project website www.humbox.ac.uk

Working closely with the humanities community, to understand their needs and requirements, is an essential part of the project and our institutional partners are helping us to achieve this. In English, we have partners working at Coventry University (Billy Brick), University of Winchester (Mick Jardine) and Aberystwyth University (Louise Holmwood Marshall and Will Slocombe) (http://tinyurl.com/mazf84). These partners are responsible for helping us to explore the issues, collect resources, evaluate the process and develop the embryonic community of ’sharers’.

Why give away your teaching materials for free?

‘The aim is simple, by developing OERs Higher Education institutions are able to contribute to the public information space, share new ideas, raise the profile of teaching and give individual academics a more public voice.’
(Millard, 2009)

We hope that gaining access to a significant collection of peer-evaluated resources of this kind will have an immediate practical impact on teachers and learners in English studies. For example, lecturers will be able to draw on the materials for curriculum and course planning tools, learning materials could be mixed and matched into study units or full courses and they could also be used as sources of inspiration when designing seminar or lecture support material.

The opportunity to showcase excellent teaching materials of publication quality will also enable the resources to be used as staff development opportunities for discussion and critique. Because the resources will contain information on the author and their host institution and be openly viewable, browsing HumBox resources will enable potential students to explore the kinds of learning experiences they might encounter during their time at the institution and could potentially raise the profile and reputation of the named author, not to mention the quality of teaching and learning across the discipline as a whole.

The development of the interface for the collection will be particularly important in facilitating a culture of sharing. We are learning about building simplicity and usability from successful Web 2.0 sites like YouTube that enable users to deposit all kinds of multimedia content simply and easily. We know that users like to see what others think of resources via the ’comment’, areas as seen on sites like Amazon . People also like to link to personal profile pages for authors of resources, as seen on sites like Facebook.

Problems and issues for OER

Currently, there is little or no encouragement for lecturers to develop learning materials with reusability in mind. One of the outcomes of the HumBox project will be greater insight into what is required and how much extra time will be needed to create ’open’ content. Hopefully, in the future, this kind of endeavour will be seen as an integrated part of scholarly work that is useful, first and foremost, to a faculty member’s own teaching, scholarship and career.

There are additional issues surrounding copyright, intellectual property and, at the most basic level, about motivating people to make contributions to HumBox. Often lecturers don’t believe their own materials are ’good enough’ to share with others. HumBox and the UKOER programme as a whole are working together to provide answers to these questions so that all parties understand clearly what is permissible and systems are in place to encourage community-based systems of quality assurance.

Look out for a HumBox event in your area

HumBox will be an easy way for humanities lecturers to share resources developed for teaching. It will be an opportunity to test whether a self-sustaining community of humanities educators is viable. There will be many challenges that will arise as the pilot progresses, but it will explore ways to work through these to create a sustainable model for HumBox that is attractive to the humanities community as a whole. After all, sharing knowledge is in-line with academic traditions and a good thing to do.
HumBox will be officially launched early in 2010. If you wish to know more about the HumBox project during its pilot phase, have a contribution or comment to make, please contact Brett Lucas, project manager, English (brett.lucas@rhul.ac.uk) or visit the HumBox website (see message re URL at top of page).

Footnotes

1 The growth in digital resources for teaching in English began in the 1990s with the growth in personal and course websites as well as the growth in digital resources like Voice of the Shuttle (http://vos.ucsb.edu/) and CTI textual studies (http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ctitext2/).

References

Katz, R. (2008) Preface. The Tower in the Cloud. Higher Education in the age of Cloud Computing. Boulder Co. Educause. Online. Available at www.educause.edu/thetowerandthecloud [accessed August 2009]

Lucas, B. (2005) E-learning Practioner Survey 2005, English Subject Centre (unpublished)

Masterman, L. & Lee, S. (2005) Reusing Learning Materials in English Literature and Language: Perspectives from Three Universities. Egham, Surrey. The Higher Education Academy English Subject Centre. Online. Available at www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/projects/archive/technology/tech10.php [accessed August 2009]

Millard, D. (2009) ‘Something Open This Way Comes’. Liaison Magazine (3). Online. Available at http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/17311/ [accessed August 2009]

Smith Nash, S. (2005) Learning Objects, Learning Object Repositories, and Learning Theory: Preliminary Best Practices for Online Courses. Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects V1, 2005. Online. Available at www.ijklo.org/Volume1/v1p217-228Nash.pdf

Yuan, Li. and Macneill, S. Kraan, W. (2008) Open Educational Resources – Opportunities and Challenges for Higher Education. JISC CETIS. Online. Available at http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/images/0/0b/OER_Briefing_Paper.pdf