Researching the registry: establishing an open education policy dataset

Much discussion of open education policy has occurred at the supranational level and in some cases, nations and subnational governments have taken up the challenge of incorporating open resources and practices into policymaking. What is less clear, and less straightforward to investigate is the extent to which individual institutions are developing policy to support openness. This session reports on work in progress towards the author's current study of OE policymaking in higher education institutions. In order to sketch some key features of the OE policy landscape for this wider study, it is necessary to collect and examine a wide range of existing institutional policy documents. The OER Policy Registry is an existing dataset, previously maintained by Creative Commons, which has been imported into the OER World Map (oerworldmap.org) in 2018. At the time of writing the registry contains 148 policies, or more accurately, records of policies indicating the source organisation and link and some metadata regarding type. It is not yet clear whether the current metadata held and/or schema are well-suited to the use cases of potential visitors to the registry. Furthermore, it is not yet clear that all records represent an actual 'policy', and if not, what other designations will be most appropriate. Therefore, prior to conducting research based on the registry as dataset, there is a need to audit the contents of the registry to understand what exactly it contains and establish inclusion and exclusion criteria for this aspect of the study, as well as helping to enhance the use of metadata to describe the current collection and future entries. This session will tell part of the author's research story, of identifying and describing an OE policy dataset, and initial findings from the investigation