Opening UCL: roadmap for a new higher education landscape

Perspectives for Open Education at UCL

The UCL Open Education project recently hosted Opening UCL, a symposium on Open Education to explore the current landscape in open education practice in higher education. Some highlights include:

• Innovative Open Educational Resources (OERs):  MOOCs (such as 23 Things) and interactive classroom surveys were showcased by Edinburgh and the Open University
• The Open Knowledge Foundation explained how open education is a global social and ethical imperative, how it can enrich research, and How to make data open
• Radiopaedia illustrates how online textbooks have the edge over paper versions, and can be open to all, easy to update and free for less wealthy countries
• UCL Arts and Sciences undergraduates and their tutor described how cross-discipline research honed research and meta skills, with a Wikibooks entry as the output.

OER were shown to foster learning, digital literacy, creativity, student engagement, and collaboration across disciplines.

UCL Library Services and Digital Education, co-hosts, introduced the UCL Roadmap for Open Education.  By 2021, open education will be embedded within the UCL community via supporting policies, infrastructure, and a connected curriculum of research-based teaching frameworks and student-generated research, to include:

• UCL Open: Environment, the new megajournal
• an open education resources repository
• UCL Press, the UK’s first open access university press, nearing 2 million downloads

Also read a full account of Opening UCL by Susan Koseoglu, Goldsmiths College.

Further Reading

• A Connected Curriculum, Dilly Fung, UCL Press
• The Battle for Open, Martin Weller, the Open University
• News article: UCL Open Access Megajournal Starts Taking Submissions