By Lucinda Bromfield, Principal Lecturer BPP University Law School
It’s nearly time for OER24 – a fantastic celebration of all things Open Education in Cork, Ireland on the 27th and 28th of March! And Open Education should be celebrated and supported, it is literally life changing, supplying educational materials to those who would otherwise not have access to them.
But making our hard work open and easy to access highlights a paradox at the heart of being a learning and teaching professional. Most of us want to share our successful strategies and materials freely, but we need to keep some control to progress in our careers. We need a way of evidencing reach and impact, even if our instinct is to throw open everything and say – go on – help yourselves if it will help!
It was from these opposing desires that the National Teaching Repository (‘NTR’) was born. Funded by an AdvanceHE Good Practice Grant in 2020 the NTR started in the UK as an open access database where you can upload and share proven teaching resources and pedagogical research, AND you can measure the impact of your practice as evidence for AdvanceHE Fellowships, academic promotion or just your own interest.
Founded by Professor Dawne Irving-Bell (for the current Board, please see the end of this blog) the NTR will generate a citation for others to acknowledge your work, you can link to an ORCID ID and get a unique DOI for each work uploaded. You can set your own Creative Commons (CC) licence level so you’re in charge of what your work should be used for and you can have an NTR profile which you can link to institutional and personal websites, blogs, or whatever. It’s got built-in sharing via social media and even limited Altmetric tracking so you can see where your work is ending up all over the world – because although it started in the UK, the NTR quickly went global. It is free to use for anyone with access to the internet and is accessed all around the world, including some of the countries rated by the UN as ‘least developed’. It’s reach and impact won it the Open Education Global’s (OEGlobal) International Award for Excellence in Open Collaboration in 2023.
I’ve recently contributed my first piece of work to the NTR and I can vouch for the ease of the process of uploading and linking and also how strangely addictive it is to see the views, downloads and social media mentions gradually stack up…
You can explore the NTR and make your own contribution here – somewhere else to contribute the amazing talks, resources and discussions generated by OER24!
The National Teaching Repository Board members are Dr Scott Turner, Canterbury Christ Church University; Dr Nathalie Tasler, University of Glasgow; Dr Kate Cuthbert, Staffordshire University; Laura Stinson, Nottingham Trent University; Sue Beckingham, Sheffield Hallam University; Professor Peter Hartley, Edge Hill University; Neil Withnell, University of Salford; David Wooff, (National Teaching Repository Chair), BPP University; Liam Bullingham, University of Essex and Professor Dawne Irving-Bell, BPP University.
Author Bio
Lucinda Bromfield is a ‘pracademic’ having been a practising employment solicitor before joining BPP University Law School. She is a Principal Lecturer and combines her learning and teaching duties with several other roles, including acting as a Training Manager helping colleagues improve their learning and teaching practice. She is currently working on scholarship for the Law School, supporting colleagues to create and disseminate their amazing work, and furthering her own research interest in attitudes to failure and humanising online learning through inclusivity and engagement.
Registration is still open for the 15th annual conference for Open Education research, practice and policy will be organised by ALT, in partnership with Munster Technological University (MTU).