Barriers and enablers in institutionalising

open approaches to curriculum design

Peter Chatterton

You build your snowball e.g. open resource, tool, methodology, process, community of practice

it (hopefully) has momentum to continue its journey …… to where ???

….. but barriers can get in the way

Barriers - institutional

Cultural attitudes and established practices wrt open design

Understanding of vocabulary, issues, costs, benefits & impact

Sustainability and embedding of "open" projects

Skills & knowledge required to create, use and re-use OERs

Time, resource and support

Quality assurance

Senior management buy-in

Variable usability of repositories / quality of materials

Enablers - institutional

•Changing people & culture

•Simple change approaches e.g. Critical Friends & change agents (inc. students)

•Staff CPD (accredited?), recognition and reward

•Visioning and scenario planning

•Communications & stakeholder engagement

•Institutional change management techniques

•Internal communities of practice

• Influencing organisational change

•Continuous improvement approaches

•Change agents and champions

•Making the “business case”.

•Embedding or aligning open approaches

•Open design quality and evaluation framework

•Aligning with institutional/faculty goals, drivers and needs

•Embedding in strategies

•Embedding in processes, systems & services

•Focusing on impact and returns on investment

•Creating useable tools, resources & support

Barriers - sector

“Not invented here”

Insufficient “motivators” & resources

Increasing competitionLack of evidence

Lack of “rating/feedback” culture and practice

Enablers - sector

Partnerships and collaborations (OLTF)

Employer sector approaches to supporting

work-based/related learning

Subject sector SIGs/communities of practice

Sector approaches to stakeholder communications and

engagement

Enhanced usable repositories (deposit, dissemination &

rating)

Infinity?