'A Learning Revolution!' Open Educational Resources

Since 2009 HEFCE have provided £5.7m to fund 29 Open Educational Resources (OER) pilot projects. JISC have been collaborating with the Higher Education Academy to oversee this programme, and soon another group of successful bids will be announced for the latest round of funding.

Keen to learn more about OER I attended the event 'Open Educational Resources International Symposium: UK perspectives on Open Educational Resources' held in London on Friday 23 July.

OER are freely available resources with permissions to allow their re-use and repurposing by both educators and learners worldwide.
I learnt that:

1. Resource release in higher education is the future. It’s already happening all round the world. Keynote speaker Mary Lou Forward of OpenCourseWare Consortium called it a ‘Learning Revolution’.

2. Good links if you’re new to OER are the Higher Education Academy and JISC OER websites.

3. Work may need to be done to support the change in mind-set for colleagues to willingly share their teaching materials. More than one delegate commented that sharing research materials is an accepted and essential practice but that teaching materials are held onto by their creators more tightly.

4. There is a certain amount of risk inherent in publishing OER. Naomi Korn of JISC made this point as she advised on how to use Creative Commons licences to facilitate Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). You will need to unpick all the layers of the resource to determine IPR - e.g. did you credit the clip art illustration used in your slides - and under what licence has the clip art been released?

5. Ongoing discussions within discipline communities are likely to include how best to make OER sustainable especially in the current financial climate of HE - a point made by Sarah Porter, Head of Innovation at JISC. Part of this debate will include the role of 'selling' OER to policy makers, including those in HE institutions as they are increasingly asked to approve the release of materials produced by employees for free distribution.

6. Other challenges include those of (a) accreditation when whole 'courses' are published and (b) ensuring quality when resources are deposited.

7. HEFCE will be publishing the final report of the Online Learning Task Force this autumn.

Brian Lamb of the University of British Columbia rounded up the day with an inspiring keynote speech where he fast-tracked the audience round a range of OER-related websites accompanying the journey with fascinating stories and ending with the bold question 'How is Higher Education going to change the web?' Now there's a question...