File:POERUP D5.2 Dissemination Report v1.0.pdf

Selected extracts from the Dissemination Report

Executive Summary

This report lists all the POERUP deliverables and outputs and attempts, where appropriate, to identify their impact. The key project presentations are described in another deliverable (D5.4 – Project Presentations); this report identifies the potential impact that the project deliverables have had to date.

4 Dissemination

Dissemination started early in the project's lifetime - in fact the POERUP wiki was running even before the POERUP bid was submitted and the first page with content on it appeared four days after bid submission.

Two months after the project formally started there was a leaflet produced for the EU Coordinators meeting in mid February 2012, and by March 2012 a systematic process of presentations at conferences had started. Furthermore, by this time the project had consolidated the pre-bid research and other OER-related work in the interregnum (between bid submission and project start) so that non-trivial results could be disseminated, unusual for a project that early in its life.

It also helped that there are several experts among POERUP partners who receive many invitations to conferences across the world.

Notwithstanding, it was not until late 2012 that presentations began to take on a deeply researched aspect.

This 'more researched' series of presentations started with the OER13 conference in the UK in March 2013, the EDEN conference in June 2013 (Norway), the EIF (EFQUEL Innovation Forum) in September 2013 (Granada), the Online Educa Conference in Berlin and the Media & Learning conference in Brussels in December 2013; then in 2014 there were POERUP-related presentations at OCW14 (Slovenia, April), eLSE (Romania, April), Networked Learning (Scotland, April), OER14 (England, April), and LINQ/EFQUEL Innovation Forum (Crete, May) - culminating at EDEN (Croatia, June) with a workshop on policy issues and demonstrations of the POERUP OER databases and OER Maps.

A particular feature of this set of presentations was the substantial involvement (four events including a panel on policy) at OCWC14, the annual conference of the US-based Open CourseWare Consortium (now called the Open Education Consortium).

6 Some conclusions

The main thrust of the original Dissemination Plan (D5.1) has been adhered to, in spite of the many difficulties the project encountered through the enforced withdrawal of a key partner half way through. Although only five of the six remaining partners made presentations at national / international conferences, the sixth partner (University of Lorraine) was deeply involved with the French ministry throughout the policy development phase of POERUP and used project analysis and research in detailed discussions with them.

The planned total of presentations was comfortably exceeded and the project extension until June 2014 made it possible to include presentations at two important conferences which would otherwise have been out of scope for this report: the LINQ/EFQUEL Innovation Forum in Crete (May) and the EDEN conference in Zagreb (June).

A search of presentations on Slideshare, using POERUP as the search term reveals a total of 119 presentations including references to the project.

Impact is difficult to assess immediately after the end of such a project; the main purpose was to generate policy recommendations at national and EU levels which were firmly founded in research and analysis and such recommendations take time to deliver results. During the course of the project in 2013, at the time when the Commission was preparing its Opening Up Education initiative, we received anecdotal evidence that the POERUP research and draft recommendations had had some influence on the content of the initiative and its Key Transformative Actions.

The project extension also enabled us to undertake a more extensive revision of the main country reports and to develop interactive maps of OER initiatives. The development of maps enabled fruitful links with a number of other current EU projects - notably eMundus - see http://www.emundusatlas.org/world.

5 Reporting single actions

There have been over 30 presentations at events, mainly international ones, where POERUP has been presented or featured in a significant way. The 22 presentations which featured substantial analytical conclusions from the project are detailed in D5.4 Project Presentations.

See also the detailed action list in Annex 1: File:POERUP D5.2 Annex 1 DG-actions-to-Final-report.pdf