Abstract:

This presentation showcases how the sharing of expertise beyond national boundaries can work for the greater good in learning and teaching, and impact on the student experience.

The educational landscape has changed significantly over the last decade, as have students’ expectations due to ubiquitous technology [1], [2]. We describe the success of a UK centre of expertise, Mimas, based at the University of Manchester, that delivers online services to support research and teaching; with a focus here on learning and teaching materials and socioeconomic research data. We show how national initiatives, such as those we describe, can enhance the student experience, and contribute to the skills and employability agenda that are so relevant to 21st century learners [3], [4]. We also describe how we are sharing our expertise with countries in Europe to meet their national strategic priorities.

Firstly we describe two services that deliver open access resources for teaching and learning. We move on to introduce findings from a project that investigated the use of socioeconomic research data in teaching that has helped us start to build a body of evidence to demonstrate the impact of using real world data on the student experience. Thirdly, we show how, having built a national profile for online learning services delivery, we are expanding beyond the boundaries of the UK to share resources, and expertise, with others through an EU Leonardo Transfer of Innovation project.

We start with the international award winning initiative [5] – Hairdressing Training - a vocational online training resource, delivering interactive content for teaching and studying. The open access content has been mapped to a national vocational qualification (NVQ) scheme. We present on the use of the service since its inception, charting its history to make it a hugely popular online service and a model for others to follow.

We then talk about a second national initiative – Jorum – designed to support the global sharing of resources developed by teachers and learners in the UK. Services like Jorum can assist in helping academics save time in finding good teaching materials that can be reused and repurposed. Examples of evidence of Jorum's impact will be provided.

We present an approach taken to collect narratives (or stories) from real teachers using real data from organisations such as the World Bank, the OECD and the IMF to show impact on the student experience. This appetite for sharing ideas and materials around educational practice with valuable secondary data resources accords well with the UK’s need to upskill social science students in the use of data and statistics.

Finally we describe the Mimas led two year project - Hair.Net – that will take Hairdressing Training into three EU member states - Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria. This will facilitate labour market mobility in Eastern Europe by providing the UK's Hairdressing Training content to the partner countries, mapped to the European Qualification Framework (EQF) and their own vocational frameworks.

Changes to the educational and digital landscape in the early 21st Century bring opportunities. Mimas has over ten years’ experience of providing user focussed services in support of education and research. This presentation provides a summary of a number of key national UK initiatives, with the prize that services providing good quality, targeted content can provide real and global benefits for learners.

Keywords:

Open content, open educational resources, student experience, vocational skills, research data.