SCORE Introduction to Open Educational Resources - 27 July 2011

This event, run by the Open University's Support Centre for Open Resources in Education (SCORE) was held at King's Manor in York (a rather attractive old building, that is home to the archaeology department of the University of York). Nine delegates attended, mainly from universities in the north of England.

The first session was presented by the OU's Andy Lane, who is a Senior Fellow with Score, as well as Professor of Environmental Systems. He introduced the landscape of Open Educational Resources, as well as some of the organisations backing the concept.

He quoted a definition of OERs from Stephen Downes:"Open educational resources are materials used to support education that may be freely accessed, reused, modified and shared by anyone", and outlined four dimensions of openness:

• Open Access, i.e. not hidden behind paywalls or other barriers,
  
• Open Licence, granting permissions to use, modify, distribute,
  
• Open Format, not reliant on proprietary software to access or edit, now or in the future, and
  
• Openly created (i.e. with free software tools)

Not all OERs are created explicity for education. There is much material freely, that may be used for educational purposes, but were not created with that in mind (an example may be the York Playbills Project hosted by York St. John University). However, in developing OERs, it is useful to be clear who the intended audience is. In particular, are they aimed at other educators, or directly at learners? This has implications for the level of granularity of the material, depending on whether the student is intended to be able to benefit directly from the material, or mediated via a teacher. The potential benefits of such resources at different levels include:

• for INDIVIDUALS: the opportunity to learn, share and discuss, assess opportunities and improve work performance. BUT, guidance and a structured experience is often required.
  
• for TEACHERS: to create courseware efficiently and effectively, to learn from how others teach, to collaborate, and to localise materials from other regions. BUT the technology only supports teaching.
  
• for INSTITUTIONS: to showcase, widen enrolement, lower lifetime costs and extend outreach. BUT policies and strategies that support teachers to create OERs is required.
  
• for GOVERNMENTS AND NATIONAL AGENCIES: to showcase, attract international students, help drive changes, co-operate internationally and ease development of materials in minority languages. BUT seed funding and supportive practices are required.
  

We were told that one of the pioneers in the Open Courseware movement, MIT, found that releasing the majority of their courseware online has changed the profile of applicants for their courses, including increasing the involvement of non-tradtional students through the opportunity to "try before you buy". Open courseware also helps to bridge the gap between formal and informal teaching, and gives institutions the opportunity to try out ideas, before using them with paying students. The OER movement is further forward in the U.S. than in the U.K. - MIT now has around 95% of their course materials available online, compared to the Open University's OpenLearn initiative, which currently hosts around 3% of the OU's resources, and there are currently only 3 U.K. members of the Open CourseWare Consortium. What is holding the OU back from putting all of its materials online as OERs, is partly the cost, but also the presence of third-party material in the resources, requiring copyright to be cleared before they can be released. However, the plan from now on is for all new course materials to be openly licensed.

The process of moving towards OERs has a number of stages, outlined as:

• LEGAL
• PRACTICAL
• TECHNICAL
• PEDAGOGIC
• ECONOMIC
• TRANSFORMATIVE

He reported that the OU is now at that final stage, where Open Educational Resources are transforming how they do education.

Part 2 >>>