Defining Openness: Updating the Concept of "Open" for a Connected World

The field of Social Research Methods is shared not only by the social
sciences, but by many other disciplines. There is therefore enormous scope for
the creation and re-use of open educational resources (OERs) in this area.
However, our work with social scientists on a number of recent projects suggests
that barriers exist to OER creation and use in social research methods teaching.
Although there are now a number of national and institutional projects creating
learning resources in research methods and making them openly available for
teachers and students to use, many still use licences that restrict re-use and, in
particular, modification. We refer to these as grey OERs. We also found that, in
contrast to the well-developed practice of citation in research work, academics
and teachers had a narrow notion of licensing and copyright of teaching
materials, consistent with a limited experience of sharing teaching materials.
Academics saw potential users as mainly other academics who were subject
experts like themselves. That meant that they gave little weight to the role of
broad description and metadata in making resources findable. At the same time,
when academics looked for resources, the provenance, quality and relevance of
those resources and the ability to judge that quickly were paramount.
We discuss two approaches that attempt to tackle these issues: first, the
development of a mapping tool that supports those creating OERs to identify a
range of classificatory and metadata in a way that gives those looking for
resources a much wider range of ways of finding them; second, the
development of a website, based on Web 2.0 technology, that exploits the
contributions of academics using and reviewing research methods OERs. We
suggest that the activities on a blog-based website create a cultural context
which constitutes an element of a community of practice of social scienceacademics.
Users can find resources by quality, pedagogy, and other metadata
as well as content and through vicarious learning about the use and reviewing
of resources by other academics, they may develop better practices in their own
re-use and attribution of OERs.