Lindsay Hewitt’s scientific contributions

Open Educational Resources (OER) are widely viewed as having the potential to open up access to educational opportunities at all levels. However, issues of access, openness and free use are complex and contested. The development of OER takes place in contexts where educational and other resources are distributed unevenly, both between the global north and south and within nations in the developed world. This paper reviews recent literature on OER and widening access to higher education for adults which suggests that so far OER is having limited impact on educational inequality. In the context of the tensions and challenges identified in the literature it then presents evidence from some recent developments in Scotland where OER has been developed collaboratively in widening access partnerships. The paper argues that the findings from these new initiatives support the view that realising the promise of OER is as much through the development of innovative social practice as through development of new content. It concludes by suggesting that there is a case for extending the definition of Open Educational Practices (OEP) from a focus on design and pedagogy into the domain of partnership and social networks.

This paper takes the form of an extended reflection on the evolution of widening participation practice in The Open University (OU) over the last decade. Changing practice is discussed in relation to external policy drivers, experience gained from projects and initiatives and the importance of widening participation for the OU in Scotland in an era of mass higher education (HE). Between 2000 and 2010 there was a development from one-off project work to a focus on sustainable partnerships and networks. Throughout this period evaluation and research has been embedded in day-to-day practice. The paper draws on evidence from evaluation reports in order to reflect on lessons learned from outreach work in rural areas and partnership working with a range of agencies including local authority Community Learning and Development, unions and voluntary organisations. Through case studies we report on the design and use of a model for partnership working using the OU's Openings programme of access courses and consider the nature of partnerships and networks and the importance of context. We also argue that the notion of agencies as ‘gatekeepers’ for ‘non-traditional’ students can usefully be enhanced by a deeper understanding of the purposes of collaboration prior to recruitment and suggest that such understanding is a critical support for subsequent retention and progression.

On the basis of an intensively evaluated four-year project, this paper argues that staff development should be as 'learner centred' as student development is; and that staff development should be linked, by design, in a rigorous but flexible fashion to curriculum and institutional development. On the former point, our argument is that teaching staff, like students, have very different starting points, different priorities for development (affective, cognitive and interpersonal), and that a learner-centred approach will have the same positive effects for staff as it does for conventional student learning. On the latter point, we argue that curriculum, institutional and staff development achieve maximum effectiveness when they are progressed in a holistic and coherent fashion; and that the implication of this for staff development is that demands can only be loosely predetermined, but must be constantly defined and fine-tuned in relation to the other two areas of development, and in particular in relation to the information which emerges from embedded formative evaluation of the nature of the students' learning experience.

This paper reports on the curriculum design of an Access programme in Dumfries and Galloway which has taken 23 per cent of its intake of disadvantaged adults successfully into FE and/or HE, and many others into employment. The nature of the assessment, summative and formative, which was incorporated in the integrated curriculum design, was critical to creating confidence, a positive attitude to education, and thence to successful engagement with cognitive demands. Data from the programme demonstrates the importance of addressing such students' affective agendas, and how facilitated self-assessment in particular is a vehicle for 'mainstreaming' students from the isolation of disadvantage into successful educational progress.