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Hello. Welcome to OEG Voices.

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OEG Voices.

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OEG Voices.

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OEG Voices.

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A podcast bringing to you the voices and ideas of open educators from around the world.

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OEG Voices is produced by Open Education Global.

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A member-based nonprofit organization ...

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Supporting the development and use of open education globally.

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Learn more about us@oeglobal.org.

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There's much to take in at a global level.

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We hope to bring you closer to how open education is working ...

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By hearing the stories of practitioners ...

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Told in their invoices.

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Each episode introduces you to a global open educator ...

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And we invite you to later engage in conversation with them.

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In our OEG Connect community.

Alan Levine:
Hello everybody. This is Alan Levine from Open Education Global. We're here for another OEG Voices podcast. I've been looking forward to this one for as long as we've been trying to schedule it. What's happening right now, we just closed the nominations for the 2022 Open Education Awards for Excellence. They're now in the process where they're being reviewed. That's being done by a secret committee. We have no idea what's going on until the smoke emerges. We see who wins this year.

Alan Levine:
But we've been doing a series of conversation with winners back to 2021, which is always a great chance to talk and learn from them. But also sometimes, there's a chance to see where their work has gone since then. We also feel the episodes get interesting when we can have pairs or groups of winners. This one was pretty easy because both Lorna Campbell and Charlie Farley are representing projects from the University of Edinburgh who actually claimed four total awards.

Alan Levine:
Melissa Highton won a leadership award and Hannah Rothmann won a student award. I think we want to learn that something is going on at the university there with open education. Maybe it's the castle, but I'm really pleased to welcome Charlie Farley who's going to talk some about the 2021 Award and the Open Curation Repository Award for some work with geosciences, OER and tests.

Alan Levine:
Also, Lorna Campbell, we've been reminiscing like how long we've known each other and whatever. Lorna has been involved with open education at the university there forever, I think. We're going to hear about some work that she's done that was recognized in the open practices category. I've been talking long enough. I'm going to ask Charlie to introduce yourself, where you are, the work you do there, maybe if you want to say, how did you even get into this field?

Alan Levine:
Hi Charlie.

Charlie Farley:
Hi Alan. I'm actually a librarian by I guess trade, you'd call it. I got into this just through interest in copyright and licensing while I was working in libraries. But I've been working with Lorna in the Open Education Resources Service at the University of Edinburgh since 2015. That's six years now that we've been doing open education and open licensing education and resources around the University of Edinburgh. In fact, we just celebrated our five years of open last year, which was really nice. It a was really nice achievement to look back and see exactly what we have achieved across the university in our time.

Alan Levine:
Excellent. An action librarian. I think most librarians I meet, they say that. Anyway, I can go and talk about librarians and we can if you want, but also I'll turn over to Lorna Campbell to say hello.

Alan Levine:
Welcome to the show, Lorna.

Lorna Campbell:
Hi Alan. Thanks for inviting us. It's really lovely to be here and to chat with you. I'm not a librarian. I'm actually an archeologist. That's what I'm trained to be. But I've been working in the whole open education that we are spaced since 2008. I've actually only been at the University of Edinburgh for six years. Edinburgh is a very big, very ancient university. I still feel like I'm quite new here. But my involvement in open education does go back to about 2008 when I worked for Jisc service. At the time the Jisc was a higher education quango here in the UK. At the time, they were funding a big national project program called the UK OER Program. That ran from 2009 to 2012. I was involved in the organization that provided the technical strategy and support for that.

Lorna Campbell:
That's really where my journey into open education began. Since then, I've been involved in a wide number of projects and initiatives of all kinds of organizations including Creative Commons. I've worked with Wikimedia UK and with the Association for Learning Technology here.

Lorna Campbell:
But here at the University of Edinburgh, my role is as manager of the university's open education resources service. We're very lucky to be one of the few universities, in fact, I think possibly the only university in the UK with a dedicated open education resources service. You are actually very honored today to have the entire OER service with you. It's actually just me and Charlie. We are a very small service in a very big university. But we do work very closely with lots and lots of our colleagues across information services groups.

Lorna Campbell:
You did say, "What's going on at Edinburgh?" I think one of the things that is going on at Edinburgh is that Dr. Melissa Highton, who is the director of Learning, Teaching in Web Services here at the university, has been a really, really powerful advocate for not just open education but open knowledge here at the university. She has really driven a great deal of the change, particularly at senior management level and has been very successful in securing support and buy in for this vision for open education and open knowledge. Not only do we have the OER service, we have a formal OER policy. We also have a Wikimedian in residence here. You mentioned Hannah Rothmann who worked there, our Wikimedian, Ewan.

Lorna Campbell:
Although the OER service itself is quite small, we have a lot going on. We also have our online course production service that produces a lot of MOOCs and free short online courses. We make sure all the content from these courses is also freely available online because we want to make sure that all our content is widely available as possible.

Alan Levine:
There's much going on. I hope as we go into this conversation, it's going to be apparent that there's more to open there than OER, although OER is very important. We certainly want to get a sense about this. I would also imagine, there's a lot of buy in from faculty and students as well. We'll dive into that. But I've completely been a neglectful host and forgot to introduce my colleague and Director of OE Global, Paul Stacey. Thanks for dropping into this conversation, Paul. What do you think is going on at, I got to work on my rolling, Edinburgh? I'm mispronouncing it probably.

Paul Stacey:
No. I think one of the things I see, Alan, is that there's this wonderful meeting of high level, senior decision makers embracing it and supporting it with the grassroots interest in it. I think that is often a challenge because a lot of times, open education's bubbled up from the bottom, but meets a ceiling when it comes to senior administration support. I get the sense that at the University of Edinburgh, there is both a bottom up and a top down thing happening simultaneously.

Alan Levine:
Librarians, right? Charlie.

Paul Stacey:
And librarians.

Alan Levine:
Let's get a little bit into the award that you've been involved with. With Tes and these outreach OERs created for geosciences. First, what is Tes and what is its relationship to OER? Then maybe we'll get into how this particular program works. First of all, I'll say I'm fascinated because my training is in geology. Lorna and I came into the field from something different. I always get a keen interest when I hear geosciences and OER. Can we dive into that?

Charlie Farley:
Absolutely. We've been collaborating with the Geoscience Outreach Course since 2015, 2016 now. You also asked about Tes. Tes is the Times Educational Supplement. They have a number of different platforms. One of them is actually a teaching resources repository. Teachers anywhere can submit their learning and teaching materials. I think originally it's mostly intended to put materials on there to sell, say the call the shop and to sell. We put all of our materials up there on open licenses free for anybody to use however they like. There's an amazing amount of content on there, not just from us if you go on there and have a look. But we have been working with the Geoscience Outreach Course for the last five, six years.

Charlie Farley:
What they do is they have their students go out and work with local schools and community groups. This course group lasts an entire year. They work out something that community group or school is needing, some sort of educational material. The students collaborate and work with the teachers and the various people. They create their own educational resource of some type throughout that year. It really is about engaging with the local communities and giving back to the communities in the area. It gives the students some real well practical experience and skills.

Charlie Farley:
Once they've finished the course and they've handed in their final product, that they're assessed. Actually, part of their assessment is based on how open they've created their resources. This is a fabulous example of our open educational resources and practice and thinking being embedded in the core structure and the assessment process. I'm invited to go in and talk to the students throughout the year, explain to them copyright licensing and I also provide support. They're able to email me and they do, which I love. It's really lovely when I get those questions from them. They're often really interesting questions too.

Charlie Farley:
Once they're assessed, the teaching staff will pick some that they think are quite suitable to be made into open educational resources. Then what we do is we actually employ interns over the summer. We started off employing one intern in 2016. We now employ two interns because we've got so much fabulous work for them to do with this over the summer. They go through and they check those resources. They align them to the Scottish curriculum. All of the resources that are from the Geoscience Outreach course from Tes. They've all been aligned to the Scottish curriculum. They put up, using all the right buzzword so the teachers know what they're looking for. They can go in there, find the right thing that they need to teach their class. Download it and easy.

Charlie Farley:
Really, [inaudible 00:12:12] is taking the pressure off the teachers and giving them resources that have been created with support of university level science and knowledge. It's just been such a fabulous project to work on.

Alan Levine:
Oh, fabulous on so many levels. Because I know when I studied geology, it was all about the science and understanding it. There wasn't really, in terms of learning, this component of taking what we learn and educating others. What a fabulous experience for your students. What's the awareness level of students? Do they know of open education? Is it something novel? What do they exit with?

Charlie Farley:
Yeah. Generally, they run a number of workshops in the first semester of the course, setting the students up with the knowledge and the information they need to create their projects. When I go in and I introduce them, our first is line to give them a basis in copyright, because often copyright is not something that has been taught within the educational structure.

Charlie Farley:
This is one of the first times that they've received actual teaching in the copyright, what it means, what their responsibilities are, what licenses mean and the difference between something being copyright protected and something being released on a license. Generally, the idea of OER is a new concept to them at that point. They understand that things are available and that they can find things easily online, but not necessarily where their responsibilities are around that and what they can use while respecting the rights of the creators. It's often a really interesting discussion, lots of questions coming from them about what they can use, how they can be respectful. A great bunch of students, really fab.

Alan Levine:
I noticed when I was looking at some of the projects that it looks like part of the program is, as they're developing it, they publish their in progress work through a blog. It looks like they get some feedback. That's a component I really respect about this. It's not just about the product at the end. Do any of the projects you've seen really stand out as the ones that are exemplary or just maybe even surprising? Or just have seen a lot of success in terms of their interest from the teachers in Scotland.

Charlie Farley:
The volcano ones always prove popular. I think that's a really fun outdoor activity to do. Volcanoes are quite fun.

Alan Levine:
Wait, wait. What do they do for the volcanoes? Are they making models?

Charlie Farley:
There's one that's mostly information about volcanoes. There's one that does involve some models. There was really interesting set of four resources that went up last year, I think it is. That was about forces that involved things like making paper planes, missiles and the physics of objects moving. I quite like the ones that are talking about food and growing cycles. They'll involve projects like students growing vegetables, thinking about where the beans and baked beans come from, really focused things.

Charlie Farley:
I should also point out that the Geoscience Outreach course has actually broadened and it takes in students from different subject areas now. We also get resources from students in psychology, ecology, architecture. Now there are a number of other subject areas that have been really impressed by what's happening in this course. Students actually apply from other subject areas to get a place in there now. We're not only getting geoscience focused resources.

Charlie Farley:
There've been some really interesting ones. There was one where a student worked with a local girl guides group and there was a resource called Kind Clothing looking at the fashion industry. That one was quite well received as well. There's just quite a broad range of the subject matter that's been covered in these resources and also education level. Most of them are targeted at primary school level, but they do go up through to high school level as well.

Alan Levine:
I can just only imagine how rewarding is it for students to see their work published and used like that. I would also guess it helps the program to have this body of work that previous students have done to inspire new students.

Charlie Farley:
Yeah, absolutely. We have one resource that's proved quite popular, which is graph theory, puzzles and games. That one has been consistently a high downloaded resource. That one was actually created by one of our interns who was a member of the Math Outreach Group. She thought, "Hey, we've got these great resources that we could also make into OERs." She worked on that over the summer on the other side of the resources there that she had. That has had, what are we looking at there now, 1100 downloads. Just hugely popular.

Alan Levine:
That's fabulous. We'll definitely make sure we add links and maybe we can start more downloads happening for these great, fantastic resources. We'll come back with some more questions. But I want to shift now to hear from Lorna about her work that was recognized in open policies. I would just again guess that there is a connection between these policies and the work that we're hearing that go on that Charlie described. How did this effort in policy work? What have you seen over the arc of time happen with this?

Lorna Campbell:
Yeah. Again, the creation of the open education resources policy at the University of Edinburgh, Melissa Highton was again, very much the driver of that work. That dates back to about 2015, I think, the policy work started. That's actually before I was working with the university, but I did do some consultancy work at the University of Edinburgh at the time. Some of the initial policy scoping was also led by Stuart Nicol, who is the head of Education Design Engagement here at the University of Edinburgh. That's the division that the OER service is based in.

Lorna Campbell:
Melissa and Stuart very much led in the policy development. I came in and did a bit of consultancy work. We believed that it was important to have an open education resources policy to empower colleagues to share their teaching and learning materials, and also to provide them with that permission to reuse existing teaching and learning materials. We wanted to arrive at a point where colleagues would feel confident in sharing their teaching materials, knowing that they wouldn't have to go seek special permission from their head of department or their head of school or whatever. That the policy existed there to empower them to make that decision.

Lorna Campbell:
But of course, in order to empower colleagues to do that, they need to have the knowledge and understanding to have confidence in those decisions. This is where the whole aspect of copyright literacy comes in. In actual fact, we very much see pretty much all the university's work in the open education, open knowledge space as being driving forward our digital and information literacy agenda. We see all this work as being about digital and information literacy.

Lorna Campbell:
A lot of the work that the OER service does is about upskilling staff and students to understand how copyright works, how licensing works, how open resources can be beneficial, what the implications are of using Creative Commons licenses. Similarly, the work that Wikimedian in residence, Ewan, does work. The work he does is very much focused on viewing the creation of content through the Wikimedia projects has been about the creation of digital skills as well as open knowledge.

Lorna Campbell:
The policy is very much there to encourage and empower both our staff and students to engage with open education. It's important to be aware that it's an informative policy. It's not mandatory, it doesn't say that you must create open resources, you must use open licenses. It's very much about encouraging practice. The policy itself is adapted from a policy that was created years before by other institutions. It's been through various iterations, through various institutions at University of Edinburgh. We picked it up, we adapted it to suit our own requirements and it was approved by our learning and teaching committee originally in 2016.

Lorna Campbell:
We reviewed that policy and updated it last year. The new policy was approved in 2021. Of course, the policy itself is available under open license. We very much encourage other people to take it and use it. That policy is just one of a suite of open policies that we share, which includes lecture recording policy and the virtual classroom recording policy. They're quite different in nature. The lecture recording policy was developed, I think, that's about four years ago now, at a time when a lot of institutions were moving to recording more of their teaching. There wasn't a great deal of policy existed in that area.

Lorna Campbell:
One of our colleagues, Neil McCormick, who is our learning technology policy officer, did a comprehensive bit of desk research to see what else was out there. There was a really thorough consultation process went on with staff right across the university with unions about the implications of recording lectures. That resulted in the creation of a lecture recording policy. Because we knew that institutions all over the UK were grappling with these same issues, we made that policy available under open license as well.

Lorna Campbell:
Now that's a very different kind of policy, but we felt that by sharing it, it would be really beneficial to the sector. We then went on into the same with a virtual classroom policy that we developed in response to the great online pivot at the start of the pandemic. We very much see sharing our policies under open license as being part of that institution wide commitment to open education and open knowledge.

Alan Levine:
That's good because one of my questions was, I can easily and most people understand about how OERs are created. That's content and we have some experience there. But peeling back how the policy is made, what does it take to develop these policies? Obviously, you've already suggested a lot started with remix and reuse and you're contributing to that, but involved with just, what does it take for you who have had direct involvement in this to make these things actually appear?

Lorna Campbell:
Again, quite a lot of work. It very much depends on the nature of the policy and whether the policy is normative or informative. Again, as I said with the OER policy, it's an enabling policy. It's an encouraging policy. We're not forcing colleagues to create open content. We want people to engage with open education. The creation of that policy involved quite a lot. We did do consultations with staff. I actually went around and interviewed quite a lot of staff around the university about their perceptions of open education. Stuart and Melissa brought a huge amount of expertise to the development of that policy.

Lorna Campbell:
It was formally passed through our education, our teaching and learning committee at the time. It's now referred as our Education Committee. The development of the lecture recording policy was a slightly different beast because that is an opt out policy that is a mandatory policy. Colleagues here, they must record their lectures unless there's a good reason not to. It's like, everyone will do it unless you're good not to. Agreeing that policy involved a huge amount of consultation. As I said, that was part of a very big program right across the institution that involved installing lecture recording hardware, developing teaching practices, developing software to enable the calendaring, the opt out and the scheduling. Huge, huge, huge project. As well as all the policy work, the hearts and minds work of communicating with colleagues and reassuring their concerns in this area.

Lorna Campbell:
The involvement of the unions was also key as well, because the university unions have formal policies. They have formal positions on things like their recording of teaching and learning. There was a huge amount of consensus building required in order to arrive at a policy that all stakeholders were more or less happy with. Again, I think with policy, it is necessary to have different processes depending on the nature of that policy.

Alan Levine:
Great. I also caught some hint to this, but it is a thing we talk about a lot. For both of you, I'd like to hear about what you had to do to shift this work two years ago when the lockdown started. We'll start with Charlie to talk about, what did the Geoscience Outreach program have to do to keep this program going and also maybe speculate what it means going forward?

Charlie Farley:
For the Geoscience Outreach program, it involved the students actually going out into the community. That was something that the course had to navigate on, how could this be done safely? Which community groups could the students go out to? A lot of the groups that are involved in this project with the course, there are longstanding relationships there. It was really about making use of those relationships, opening up discussions to see what could be possible and what would benefit the geoscience, the outreach students and the groups and the schools involved.

Charlie Farley:
From our perspective in the OER service, it meant that I couldn't work in the office with our summer interns. So we switched to online. That was really interesting. We were able to have interns working for us from where they were based. Let's see. Last year, we had one intern who was based in Edinburgh and one intern who went to stay at home with her parents over the summer for a little bit. Both were able to work with us. They did fantastic jobs. Obviously, there was logistics involving making sure that they had all of the equipment that they needed. We could give them all the training and making sure that they were able to communicate with the students whose projects they were working on.

Charlie Farley:
One of the things about this is that for the students whose projects these are, they're always very keen to be involved in this next step, which goes over and beyond their academic year. But they are getting a real sense of legacy out of these resources. They're making something that's not just being assessed and then disappearing into a black hole. It's going out there. It's having purpose. It's having reuse. They're always tend to be really engaged and really enthusiastic about making sure that this is going to be the best resource that's going to provide what the teachers and their pupils are going to need and to use.

Charlie Farley:
We've seen students from the outreach course go on into careers where they've worked in education and continued to have links with the community groups that they've worked with. That real enthusiasm and the real value that the students are seeing in this project and in their work, it really did help get through this difficult time. It was something that gives them that little bit of energy and life when they're going through quite difficult times.

Charlie Farley:
Many of our interns who work with us over the summer actually tend to become open knowledge advocates. They get really enthusiastic. Our very first intern, caught up with him a few years down the track, he's working in programming and coding and very invested in open source. Another one of our students went on to run Wikipedia events and is still involved in the Wikipedia community. Both the students on the course and the students that work with us over the summer, they get a real sense of value out of the work that they're doing, not just being an assignment that disappears. They get ongoing value and legacy. I think that and the long term relationships that has been built up with the communities throughout the many years that this has been running, made that switch. That pivot really felt absolutely fine for us for this particular piece of work. Everybody was just on board, ready to go.

Alan Levine:
No big deal. But I know it was.

Charlie Farley:
It was.

Alan Levine:
Especially, I really enjoy hearing these examples of students. It shows what their university experience there has meant, but also what this also public participation has meant. That it's carried on and that's what we want to be doing. Kudos to the team for doing that.

Alan Levine:
Lorna, I assume policies had to be changed on the fly. How did that happen? I would think the virtual classroom one was the one that came right to the front.

Lorna Campbell:
Yeah. We didn't change any policies per se, but we did develop a new one, which was the Virtual Classroom Policy. That was developed in response to the online pivot in moving the majority of our teaching online. Obviously, the lecture recording policy was designed for colleagues standing in the lecture room in front of a camera with the students sitting in front of them. The whole policy was framed around that. Of course, that was no longer the case.

Lorna Campbell:
We did need new policy to govern that. There was quite a bit of anxiety, I think. It was a very anxious time for everyone of course. But there was some anxiety around the provision of teaching and learning online and the recording of teaching and learning online in this certain new virtual classroom environment and what the implications of that would be.

Lorna Campbell:
We wanted to work very quickly to create a policy in order to reassure staff that there is policy governing this. That it's not something that every single individual has to worry about. Again, the work was taken forward by our Education Technology Policy Officer, Neil McCormick. The Virtual Classroom Policy is based very heavily on the lecture recording policy. They're designed to complement each other. The language is very similar, in fact, quite consciously repeat sections. But it was tailored to accommodate teaching in a scenario like this, where now through our various virtual classroom technologies such as Blackboard Collaborate was the one that we used very, very heavily. Then of course, Teams came in and Zoom came in.

Lorna Campbell:
But in addition to the policy, there was another piece of interesting work that went on around digital safety and citizenship. That was taken forward by a colleague of ours, Vicki Madden, who is in our digital skills division. We felt that that was also an important aspect of teaching and learning online and how we all engage with each other online. We very much had these digital safety and citizenship resources that were collated in order to accompany the virtual classroom policy.

Lorna Campbell:
Neil also created supplementary resources for colleagues that they could use at the beginning of recorded online classroom sessions about setting out the expectations for both teachers and learners. We weren't really hard to turn that around very quickly. Again, to share both the policy and the digital safety and citizenship guidelines under open license, so other institutions could benefit from them as well. Again, because we already had the elected recording policy there, it was already shared under open license. We already had this commitment to open knowledge. We were already set up to make this happen. Again, Charlie said it wasn't too much of a culture shock for us, we just had to move quite fast. Indeed, that institutional level commitment to open knowledge really stood us in good stead many ways when we were trying to adjust to the all encompassing effect of the pandemic in so many different ways.

Alan Levine:
Yes. I'll bounce this off for Paul, too. I have a suspicion about what's going on at University of Edinburgh because we have it here in the room with us. But anything you want to throw in here, Paul?

Paul Stacey:
I'm just curious. I love these stories, of course, of both student success and the sharing resulting in downloads and the importance of policy. I wonder whether you could both say something about the ripple on effect of those things. It's one thing of course to do all the effort required to start to make that acceptable and an integral part of the university. But for example, with the success of geosciences, has that model been viewed by others that's something that they aspire to? Have you seen other instructors, faculty and students advocating for doing more of that across the board, whether it's in sciences or the arts?

Charlie Farley:
Yeah, we absolutely have. As I said, other subject areas started asking if their students could join the Geoscience Outreach Course. But in addition to that, one of the integral staff involved in the Geoscience Outreach Course, Andy Cross, is also involved in an experiential learning group across the University of Edinburgh, which is teaching staff who are invested in learning that actually embeds experiential learning, so learning through experience and embedding that learning in through doing.

Charlie Farley:
Andy now also runs courses over in the Edinburgh Futures Institute and has taken part of that model with him over into those courses where they actually include openness in the few of their assessments for the courses over there. They do a digital showcase or gallery showing openly of what they've been doing. We also have the MSN Digital Education with Jen Ross, incorporating OER creation as one of the assignments in one of the units in that course.

Charlie Farley:
Yeah. There's a lot of interest, curiosity and excitement about this way of starting to bring OERs into not just as things that are being used as per teaching, but things are being created and embedded within the assessment as well. A real important part of that is, as I mentioned for the Geoscience Outreach students, is this is a way for students' assignments to have legacy. To not simply be something that they're putting all this time and energy into that gets assessed and then just lost. Ewan McAndrew, our Wikimedian, he has 13 plus Wikimedia in the classroom assignments across subject areas across the university now. The students love it. They love it. They're creating articles on Wikipedia that are providing information to people that otherwise didn't exist previously. For the students, that value and that legacy and the feeling that they're contributing and giving something back is just really important. You can just see them glowing with pride about it. It's lovely.

Lorna Campbell:
I certainly think it's one of the aspects of how students engage with open education that is really positive is this feeling that they are making a difference. That they are creating something with this legacy. You can look at some of the Wikipedia articles that our students have created and they've got hundreds of thousands of page views. Some of them are about very important medical topics, for example, that didn't exist before. That's hugely powerful. These are undergraduate students as well. These aren't postgraduate research, these are undergraduate students.

Lorna Campbell:
Our undergraduate students produce a wealth of amazing work throughout their degrees that a lot of it just disappears. Gets sent off and the assessment gets marked and then that's it. It's gone. I think students really appreciate being able to create content that lives on. Also that lives on out there in the real world, on the real world right away, where they can continue to see it and point to it after they leave the university. That's evidence of their learning and their knowledge.

Alan Levine:
Most fantastic. I'm so happy and pleased that you're willing to share this experience. I think there's a lot for many of us to follow, also pick up, remix and be part of in terms of what you all have been generating these last couple years at the university. Thanks again.

Alan Levine:
I went to thank you both for being here, Lorna, Charlie and Paul for joining us. Thank you for our listeners to tuning this episode of OEG Voices. This is podcast we're doing here at Open Education Global. When you listen at the end, there's going to be a little bit of intro, outro music, a track I found called Equanimity by an artist named Nuisance. Licensed under an attribution non-commercial, Creative Commons license. Like most of our music, I find that at the Free Music Archive.

Alan Levine:
You'll find this episode at voices.oeglobal.org. We hope you engage in some follow up discussion with us in our OEG Connect community. Anybody else, if you want to share your work or suggest a future guest? I want to come back some time. I think we should talk more about the Wikimedian Residence Program because I've been a fan of that. I think we need broadly to be even more involved with Wikimedia. Thank you so much, Lorna, Charlie and Paul for being here.

Lorna Campbell:
Thanks. It's been a real pleasure for today.

Paul Stacey:
Thanks.

Charlie Farley:
It's been lovely. Thank you.

Alan Levine:
Wait a minute, wait a minute. Don't rush off so quick. We're not done here. You made it to the end of the podcast, but there's bonus content. We have some student voices on the Tes Geosciences Outreach Project. You can listen to them tell their experience and what the program is meant to them. Thanks again for listening to OEG Voices.

Amy:
I'm Amy, one of the Geoscience Outreach and Engagement students from this year. I am an astrophysics student at the University of Edinburgh. I was lucky enough to be part of the first cohort of the physics students to take part in the outreach course in 2021.

Amy:
The course aims to give students the chance to create their own bespoke resource for an external client who has a gap in their current offering of resources. The client provides the student with a brief to varying degrees of detail and then the student and client work together to develop the project. It was a real joy for me to build a relationship with my client and make a resource that fit their needs, as well as having the opportunity to be creative and add some diversity to our university studies.

Amy:
In the first half of the year, there's a real focus on giving us all the background information we need to create not only a great teaching resource, but also an open educational resource or OER. We've had workshops on everything from active and interdisciplinary learning principles and the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence, to copyright permissions and protections for OERs. Even how the course links to future careers.

Amy:
As a female physicist, it's been so great to share my passion for my subject with others. Hopefully I will have inspired some young people to get involved in science, demonstrate that it's accessible to all and even involves some creativity too.

Alisha:
Hello, I'm Alisha. I'm one of two open content curator interns this summer. I'm a recently graduated student from the University of Edinburgh. As interns, our main role is to edit and adapt the educational resources that have been created on the Geosciences Outreach Course. We take the resources that staff running the course select as most suitable for sharing in our OER collection. We fine tune them so they are ready for people to use in education across the world.

Alisha:
The Geosciences Outreach Course has such a specific focus on resources that are targeted at educational goals, expectations and outcomes in the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence. The aim is to create resources that are very clear in which learning outcomes they achieve. This clarity makes it easier for teachers to adapt resources to their own needs and quickly ascertain which parts of the resource they want to use.

Alisha:
Communicating this information about the resource is a key part of my job. Over the summer, I work to ensure that the OERs are easily understandable to a wide audience. This involves ensuring that the educational goals are relevant and aligned to the right level for the OER's content, as well as editing and repackaging the OERs. For example, adding instructions from an experiment that were originally on a teacher's guide onto a PowerPoint slide and a worksheet, so they're easily available. As well as editing the worksheets to make sure instructions are clear and they meet accessibility guidelines.

Alisha:
As a university student, I provide a non-expert view on their resources so that they can be underserved by teachers, but also by parents or youth group leaders, which was especially important in lockdown in providing open license resources to everyone. Another essential part of my role is checking the licensing of all the materials in the OERs to ensure best practice. This attention to detail allows the collection to be reliably ready for reuse by anyone, regardless of their knowledge of copyright.

Alisha:
I've also volunteered as a leader with a local girl guide, Rainbows unit, age 5 to 7. As a geography student, I was really keen to run a resource around volcanoes. I found one of the OERs from the university's geoscience outreach collection, volcanoes and volcanologists, extremely helpful and really easy to adapt for a fun educational outdoor activity. The girls absolutely loved it. I had loads of fun, watching everyone's volcanoes explode and looking at the fun colors and patterns their exploded volcanoes left.