The Demos Edgeless University report published in June this year included the intriguing line: ‘Even august institutions such as the University of Oxford now produce podcasts.’ It struck me that this sentence is as much about others' perceptions of Oxford as about the use of podcasts as such. Even Oxford? Why the surprise? Is it because it seems so unlikely that Oxford academics would grasp new technology? Is that that podcasting is so popular that Oxford can’t hold out against pressure to join in? Is it that opening up and publishing content seems out of character for Oxford?

Having come to Oxford from Leeds University, where pedagogical podcasting was pioneered, it never surprises me when academic colleagues embrace new technologies, it is no more than I would expect from people working at the top of their game. What is particularly pleasing at Oxford is the scale and breadth of the uptake. After the initial invitation to join iTunes U last summer and some impressive high speed work to get a new service in place, podcasting at Oxford has reached, and passed, a tipping point moment. The phrase ‘tipping point’ is from the Malcolm Gladwell book describing the magic moment when ideas, trends and social behaviours cross a threshold, tip and spread like wildfire. Our work in Oxford University Computing Services to provide support at the centre has been rewarded by the number of academics who have become involved and our growing community around this activity. In identifying podcasting as a way of publishing and communicating their information, the technology is actually quite incidental; colleagues are sufficiently media literate to know that as world class researchers this is an appropriate medium for disseminating their work. If you are looking for feedback on a successful service, the number of new academic users each month is enough for me. We currently deliver more than 50 hours of educational content into the public domain each month and we passed the million downloads mark in 40 weeks.

Taking the project from innovation to service has been all about developing a sustainable and devolved model of activity in a collegiate institution. The art to this is in allowing a web 2.0, do-it-yourself feeling to the activity, devolved across the University, giving responsibility to individual lecturers and departments to make the content and assure the quality, while still maintaining and adding value at the centre through careful use of metadata, technical standards, legal sign off, and robust workflows. We have worked closely this year with partners at Cambridge and Open University to overcome challenging infrastructure issues.

Having worked in learning technologies in a number of very different institutions, it seems to me that the challenge, and success, in using and embedding technology for learning and teaching comes in finding not just the technology which suits the activity, but the technology which suits the nature of the institution. The character and characters of Oxford make technologies such as podcasting a logical step. The characters present their materials with such passion and enthusiasm, knowing that the creation and dissemination of new knowledge is our business. The character is defined by the interaction of the departments and colleges so systems which are non hierarchical are essential. At Oxford we do research and we are interested in making knowledge available on a global scale. We want to attract and include the best students and staff in our organisation. Once at Oxford any student can attend any lecture and through Oxford in iTunes U anyone in the world can listen. The face to face experience may be limited to a lucky few but the content is open to all.

The materials we publish into the public domain reflect the academic activity of the place. Our podcasting site contains public lectures, interviews with leading academics and visitors, seminar series and conference sessions. It also provides advice on how to apply to the University, advice this year’s Freshers found valuable. What makes coming to Oxford distinctive is the opportunity to live, work and study alongside top researchers as part of an academic community. Every evening across Oxford there are research seminars going on in colleges and departments with researchers talking about their latest work: we record those. There are many stories of how two great thinkers have inspired each other while here, so we have a series of ‘interviews with Oxonians’ highlighting who is here and what they do. More often than not as they talk they make reference to how other people writing and researching at Oxford shape their thinking. Sometimes they work together to record podcasts which capture unique conversations or a moment in time.

Figure 1; Oxford's iTunes U site

Working closely with Oxford colleagues and hearing their enthusiasm for wide dissemination of their work made me confident that our project to support the creation of open educational resources would be a success. The practice of education need not be a possessive one. I am happy to support colleagues in making informed choices about how their materials can and may be re-used. Open content literacy is knowing when and why open content is needed, where to find and share it, and how to create, evaluate, and use it in an ethical manner.

The success of open content relies on getting the right open content to the right people at the right time. We are lucky to have a VLE at Oxford in which the default for learning materials is that they are open. The VLE team always start from the assumption that materials are shared and ask staff to be clear why and when materials should be locked away. All universities employ staff in libraries, repository projects, and learning technology groups who have the expertise to publish, locate, retrieve and exploit open content. It is up to each of us to explain about creative commons licensing, enable easy access to that content, organise it in an easily accessible manner, train staff to access and exploit it effectively and take a lead in raising levels of open content literacy within our organisation.

Oxford is an exciting place to work. In the learning technologies group we provide services, run projects, teach IT skills to thousands of members of the University, publish open code and carry out pedagogical research. Each activity informs the other to ensure we are best meeting the needs of the University and the learning technology community. Our projects in podcasting, community created collections, virtual worlds, green IT and computer modelling have all hit the headlines this year and, I am pleased to say, mostly in a good way. If you haven’t yet played one of our podcasts or donned boots to walk the virtual trenches on Frideswide Island I can only invite you to take a look, and I hope it will be a nice surprise.

Melissa Highton
Head of the Learning Technologies Group
Oxford University
melissa.highton@oucs.ox.ac.uk

Links

Podcasting at Oxford:http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/
Oxford on iTunes U: http://itunes.ox.ac.uk/