Presentation about the University of Edinburgh OER Service's programme of student student employment, exploring how salaried internships encourage students to become knowledge activists. OER24 Conference, Cork.

1. Empowering Student
Engagement with Open
Education.
Lorna M. Campbell, Mayu Ishimoto & Geoff Fortescue | OER24 | Cork 2024

2. Overview
 University of Edinburgh OER vision.
 Supporting student engagement through
salaried internships.
 Open Content Curator interns.
 Media interns.
 Open eTextbook interns.
 Knowledge activism.
 Career development.
The Grammar of Ornament, pl.XLV, CC BY NC SA, University of Edinburgh Library

3. University of Edinburgh Vision
Our graduates, and the knowledge we discover
with our partners, make the world a better
place.
Our teaching and research is relevant to society
and we are diverse, inclusive and accessible to
all.
Commission from the Dodge of Venice, Recto, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, University of Edinburgh.

4. OER Policy
 Approved by Learning and Teaching
Committee in January 2016, updated 2021.
 Encourages staff and students to use, create
and publish OERs to enhance the quality of
the student experience.
 Helps colleagues make informed decisions
about creating and using OER.
Prodromus Dissertationum Cosmographicarum, f.p.24, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, University of Edinburgh.

5. https://open.ed.ac.uk/

6. OER Service
 Based in Educational Design & Engagement.
 Provide advice and guidance on OER and
open education.
 Run digital skills programme on digital and
copyright literacy.
 Support open education in the curriculum.
 Work closely with Online Course Production
Service and Wikimedian in Residence.
Papers of William Speirs Bruce, No.686, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, University of Edinburgh.

7. Student Engagement
 EUSA provided impetus for the University to adopt an OER Policy.
 “Student-led, OpenEd, and wiping away the open wash”, by Stuart Nicol,
Head of Educational Design & Engagement, & Dash Sekhar, EUSA VP
Academic Affairs, OER15 Conference Mainstreaming Open Education,
Cardiff.
 OER creation assignments embedded in courses.
 Many UoE OERs are co-created by students.
 We employ a wide range of student interns.

8. Student Employment

9. Information Service Group Student Employment
 ISG has a commitment to student employment through a wide range of
salaried internships.
 Funded by ISG revenue budgets.
 CIO sets student employment targets with each directorate.
 338 assignments across ISG in 2023/2024.
 Recruitment is managed and supported by a dedicated in-house team,
Unitemps Edinburgh.
 Unitemps improve the student employment experience, support students
while they work, and encourage the creation of more student jobs.

10. ISG Student Employee Blog: https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/isintern/

11. Educational Design & Engagement Internships
 Since 2018 EDE has recruited over 120 undergraduate & postgraduate student
employees:
 97 Learn Foundations VLE enhancement interns,
 5 media interns,
 17 OER Service interns,
 9 marketing and communications interns.
 Full time & part-time fixed term contracts.
 Open Content Curators
 Media Studio Interns
 Open eTextbook Interns

12. Open Content Curators

13. Open Content Curators
 Full time summer internships with the OER Service running since 2016.
 11 undergraduate students employed from a range of subject areas:
 Martin Tasker
 Tomas Sanders
 Cecily Plascott
 Ana McKellar & Andrew Fergusson
 Amy Cook & Alysha Wilson
 Molly Wicket & Alyssa Heggison
 Mayu Ishimoto & August Enger

14. GeoSciences Outreach Course, https://www.ed.ac.uk/geosciences/undergraduate/geoscience-outreach

16. Open.Ed on TES Resources, https://www.tes.com/teaching-resources/shop/OpenEd

18. Open Education Awards for Excellence: Open Curation / Repository https://edin.ac/3T1K2pB

19. Open Content Curators Blogs https://open.ed.ac.uk/tag/open-content-interns/

20. Open Content Curator Internship Reflections 2023 https://edin.ac/3v63TMn

21. Media Studio Interns

22. Media Studio Interns
 5 interns employed since 2018.
 Role has evolved over the years.
 Initially archiving legacy media onto new EditShare server & sharing MOOC
content through our Open Media Bank.
https://media.ed.ac.uk/channel/Open+Media+Bank/
 Now supporting media production and many aspects of the media service.
 Growing open media stock footage collection on MHC and Pexels.
 This year, hiring a Modern Apprentice for 18 months, rather than an intern.

23. Media Studio Interns, CC BY 4.0, Media Studio Team,
University of Edinburgh.

24. Open Media Stock Footage
https://media.ed.ac.uk/channel/Ope
n+Media+Stock+Footage/
University of Edinburgh on Pexels
https://www.pexels.com/@university
-of-edinburgh-328305910/

25. Open Textbook Interns

26. Open eTexbooks for Access to Music Education project blog
https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/opentextbooks/

27. Our student partners: Ana Reina Garcia, Kari Ding, Ifeanyichukwu Ezinmadu.

28. “Attending the OERxDomains 2021 conference was a very
insightful experience through which my co-interns and I were able
to present about the ongoing music theory e-textbook project.
Attending other seminars by speakers from around the world
further opened up my mind towards understanding OER in a
broader perspective.”
~ Ifeanyichukwu Ezinmadu

29. Fundamentals of Music Theory ebook, https://books.ed.ac.uk/edinburgh-diamond/catalog/book/ed-9781912669226
Downloads (March 2024):
21,337

30. Knowledge Activism

31.  Digital, data & copyright literacy skills.
 Understanding how knowledge is created, shared & contested online.
 Collaborative working & collective knowledge creation.
 Critical thinking & source evaluation.
 Information synthesis.
 Writing as public outreach.
Benefits of engaging with open knowledge

32. Allison Littlejohn (49618056241), Disruptive Media
Learning Lab, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.
Hood, N. & Littlejohn, A. (2018).
Hacking History: Redressing Gender
Inequities on Wikipedia Through an
Editathon. International Review of
Research in Open and Distributed
Learning, 19(5).
https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v19i5.4
309
Littlejohn, A. & Hood, N. (2018).
Becoming an online editor: perceived
roles and responsibilities of Wikipedia
editors. Information Research, 23(1).
http://www.webcitation.org/6xmr9gIBO

33. Dr Akwugo Emejulu, CC BY 3.0,
The Scottish Parliament on Wikimedia Commons
“Our interpretation of radical digital citizenship seeks to
displace instrumental conceptions of digital literacy, which
reduce digital citizenship to mere skills acquisition for
navigating a digital world…We argue that radical digital
citizenship should problematise dominant ideas about
technologies and rethink citizens’ relations with
technology to advance the common good.”
Emejulu, A. & Mcgregor, C. (2019). Towards a radical
digital citizenship in digital education. Critical Studies in
Education, 60(1).
https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2016.1234494

34. Tomas, Open Content Curator Intern, CC BY,
Lorna M. Campbell
Black History Month Wikipedia editathon, CC BY-SA 4.0, Stinglehammer,
on Wikimedia Commons

35. Mangrove Nine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangrove_Nine

36. Mangrove Nine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangrove_Nine

37. Mangrove (film) by Steve McQueen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangrove_(film)

38. Wikipedia and History - Tomas Sanders https://media.ed.ac.uk/media/1_44vqmw7c

39. HIV Scotland Wikipedia Editathon https://edin.ac/3TmB0Fh

40. Accessible and Inclusive Resource Publishing by Molly Wickett and Alyssa Heggison
https://open.ed.ac.uk/accessible-and-inclusive-resource-publishing/

42. Top Right: James Drummond, "The Porteous Mob", 1855, Public Domain; Other Images: Mayu Ishimoto, CC BY.

43. Career Opportunities

44. The best things I got out of my internship were the
confidence to work in an office environment (although
it was online) such as time management, and an
understanding of how significant having a great line
manager and team is to a job. All whilst having fun
making something with a legacy and aim I believe in. I
am very pleased that my current job also allows me to
have direct positive impact and play a part in shaping
a beneficial legacy for student employment at
Edinburgh.
~ From Curation Intern to Recruitment Consultant in
ISG by Alysha Wilson, 2022,
https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/isintern/2022/05/19/from-
curation-intern-to-recruitment-consultant-in-isg/

45. Media Studio Intern Ruth Buckley, CC BY 4.0, Media Studio Team, University of Edinburgh

46. uCreate MakerSpace https://www.ucreate.is.ed.ac.uk/

47. SymphoMe https://www.symphome.org/

48. Martin Tasker, working as Open Content Curation Intern in 2016, CC BY, Lorna M.
Campbell

49. Having just left university, I have recently been subject to an ungodly number of job interviews. We would sit
down, exchange pleasantries and meander through my job history, before getting to the summer of 2016.
“Says here you completed an internship in ‘open education’. What’s that?”
And each time I would have to explain to them that this concept that they had never heard of was the reason I
was sitting in front of them at all.
And now I am working in software development – an industry built on openness and freedom of information.
The software development community is perhaps the platonic ideal of open education. Central community
instructional resources, editable by anyone and maintained by dedicated volunteers, provide an accessible
and coherent entry point to topics, while forums and blogs answer individual questions, no matter how vague
or specific. All of this is free to access, modify and redistribute, with authors rarely asking for much more than
attribution. Without these resources, not only would I not be in my current job, but neither would swathes of
people currently in the industry, taking with them countless advances we have made in the last twenty years.
~ Reflecting on the importance of open education by Martin Tasker, 2019, https://open.ed.ac.uk/reflecting-
on-the-importance-of-open-education/

50. Recommendations
 Think about different ways to engage students with open education.
 Start with volunteering opportunities.
 Tie volunteering & internships to internal award structures.
 Look for small pots of funding to recruit salaried student employees.
 Identify areas where student employees can help to supplement the work of
existing services & support strategic initiatives.
 Focus on co-creation - encourage staff and students to work together to
create OER and open education opportunities.
 Encourage open education practice through reflective blogging.

51. Further Information
 OER Service https://open.ed.ac.uk/
 Open Content Curator blog posts https://open.ed.ac.uk/tag/open-content-interns/
 Open Content Curator Internship Reflections 2023 https://edin.ac/3v63TMn
 ISG Student Employee blog https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/isintern/
 Wikipedia and History – Tomas Sanders https://edin.ac/3IDVIdk
 Student Co-created OERs on TES Resources https://www.tes.com/teaching-
resources/shop/OpenEd
 Open Education Awards for Excellence: Open Curation Repository, University of Edinburgh
https://edin.ac/3T1K2pB
 Open Stock Media Footage https://media.ed.ac.uk/channel/Open+Media+Stock+Footage/
 Open eTextbooks for Access to Music Education project
https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/opentextbooks/

52. Lorna M. Campbell
lorna.m.campbell@ed.ac.uk
Mayu Ishimoto
mishimot@ed.ac.uk
This presentation is licensed CC BY 4.0, University of Edinburgh, unless otherwise indicated.
Geoff Fortescue
geoff.fortescue@ed.ac.uk