Learning to Share: Collaboration & (Open) Quantitative Methods Teaching Resources Online

1. Learning to Share: Collaboration & (Open) Quantitative Methods Teaching Resources Online

2. Luke Sloan School of Social Sciences Cardiff University SloanLS@cardiff.ac.uk

3. Known Difficulties in QM Teaching • Teaching QM is hard work & takes time • Difficult to engage students • Many examples needed (surveys, data) • Finding interesting data • Finding interesting findings (e.g. heteroscedasticity)

4. However • REF pressures divert time and effort from teaching • Often given to junior members of staff • Thrown in the deep-end with other duties • Career development requires scholarship in substantive areas, not generic methods

5. The Result… • We do the ‘best we can’ (but not the ‘best we could’) • Tendency to teach what we already know • Scores of individuals in scores of institutions recreating QM materials on the same topics • We could save ourselves much time and effort by pooling our resources To a certain extent this can apply to all modules, but the level of difficulty and anxiety students experience with QM exacerbates these issues

6. An Effective QM Curriculum • Is collaborative • Draws on experts from multiple substantive areas (many examples!) • Peer reviewed teaching materials? • Pooling of assessment regimes (e.g. MCQs)

7. Dissemination of Materials

9. ACTIVITY: Barriers or Excuses?Barriers to Sharing? Someone might plagiarise my resources ‘Sharing’ suggests a reciprocal arrangement – what’s in it for me? My materials are very subject specific so they wouldn’t be much use to anyone else Private curriculum providers will have free access to academic materials People learn a subject through teaching it and may be tempted to take shortcuts (i.e. ‘off the shelf’ teaching) There are already examples using t-tests online so why should I upload another version? I’ve put a lot of effort into my materials, why would I just let someone else use my work?

10. Group Discussion

11. Protecting Authorship • Your materials can be protected under a Creative Commons license • Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA): • This license lets others remix, tweak and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. Source: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ [accessed 22/01/13] • This licensing structure is built-in to platforms such as JORUM (http://www.jorum.ac.uk/)

12. Summary • If we’re serious about improving the QM experience for students then why wouldn’t we work together? • Imagine the advantages of having a central bank of multiple choice questions (so what if students can access them?) • Build a teaching profile online • Get added value from all the effort and hard work you put into you teaching materials (what have you got to lose?) • Resources sharing is likely to be a future agenda

13. Luke Sloan School of Social Sciences Cardiff University SloanLS@cardiff.ac.uk Learning to Share: Collaboration & (Open) Quantitative Methods Teaching Resources Online