Group Admins
Description
Session Description
This practice presentation will explore how the University of Edinburgh supports creativity across the curriculum through engagement with openness, while at the same time developing staff and students’ critical digital and information literacy skills.
At the University of Edinburgh, we believe that supporting creative engagement with open education is squarely in line with our institutional mission to deliver impact for society, and discover, develop and share knowledge. Our vision for open educational resources (OER) is founded on principals of the Scottish Enlightenment, excellent research and teaching collections, and the University’s civic mission. This vision is backed up by an OER Policy and Service, which provides staff and students with advice and guidance on creating and using OER. To complement this vision, the University’s Information Services Group has a Playful Engagement strategy that fosters a culture where creative innovation and playful learning are embedded in our practices. In addition, the Centre for Research Collections encourages engagement with the University’s collections by digitising over 40,000 images, many of which are available under open licence.
The OER Service supports the development of digital and information literacy skills for staff and students in order to enable colleagues to make informed choices about the use and creation of copyright and open resources; to understand how knowledge is constructed, online; to use our world-class collections in innovative and engaging ways; and to make a lasting contribution to the global pool of open knowledge.
Collaborating with the Interactive Content Team and Library colleagues, the OER Service employs a range of creative approaches in its digital skills development, supporting creativity and innovation across the curriculum, and inspiring co-creation of educational experiences that are challenging, transformational and engaging. In this session we will provide examples of these approaches and how staff and students have engaged with them, including the award winning 23 Things for Digital Knowledge open online course, creative reuse of open licensed University collections and MOOC media content, including our open licensed colouring book, engaging with Wikipedia in collaboration with our Wikimedian in Residence, playful approaches to teaching copyright literacy such as Gif It Up! and Board Game Jam, and the School of Geosciences adoption of playful approaches to create OER games for Scottish schools. We will also share the results of a research project on the effectiveness of Board Game Jam, which revealed that participation was driven by a high level of interest in the use of playful approaches.
Participants will benefit from seeing real world examples of how supporting openness and playful engagement at the institutional level can foster creativity and innovation, and will gain inspiration around how such approaches could be implemented in their own contexts and institutions. The presentation will introduce the University of Edinburgh’s vision and strategy for OER and playful engagement, showcase examples of some of the playful approaches we employ, demonstrate how these help to foster creative approaches to teaching, learning and engaging with our collections, and reflect critically on research into their effectiveness.
References
Farley, S. (2019). Playful Engagement. University of Edinburgh. Available at: https://thinking.is.ed.ac.uk/playful-engagement/
Murzyn, E. and Farley, S., (2018). Playful Learning – evaluation and development of OER Board Game Jams. Learning & Teaching Conference, University of Edinburgh. Available at: http://www.docs.hss.ed.ac.uk/iad/Learning_teaching/Academic_teaching/Events/LT_Conference/2018/s1/1E2E_MurzynE_Farley_S_LTConf2018.pdf [Accessed 30/05/2019]
Campbell, L.M., (2017). The Benefits of Open Education and OER. Open World. Available at: http://lornamcampbell.org/higher-education/the-benefits-of-open-education-and-oer/ [Accessed 12/03/2019]
Highton, M., (2019). Playful and PlayFair. Melissa Highton Blog. Available at: http://open.ed.ac.uk/supporting-open-education-open-knowledge-at-the-university-of-edinburgh/ [Accessed 12/03/2019]
Meyer, P., (2010). From Workplace to Playspace: Innovating, Learning, and Changing through Dynamic Engagement. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
