The one year programme with a value of around £4m was designed to build on the sustainable practice identified in the first two stages, and to expand in new directions to link OER to other areas of work.
Projects in phase three investigated the use of OER approaches to work towards particular strategic, policy and societal goals.
Theme A : Extend OER through collaborations beyond HE
Working in partnership with organisations from another sector in order to release and/or collect OER materials that meet their identified needs. Potential sectors for involvement:
Theme B: Explore OER publishing models
- Collaboration with commercial publishers. Working with one or more commercial publishers in collecting or releasing OER. This might include university presses, digital publishers, textbook providers or other forms of commercial publisher.
- Using a range of openly-licensed collections of materials as the basis for new resources. Releasing predominately materials that have been developed from other collections of open materials. For example, you may wish to draw on openly licensed resources from JISC Digitisation collections, or from other collections of OER and other suitable material.
Theme C: Addressing sector challenges
- Supporting emerging forms of learning and accreditation. Releasing and/or collecting together material in ways that support an identified non-traditional mode of study and accreditation: for example, the accreditation of prior (experiential) learning, personal learning, independent online learning communities, mentorships, collective learning, new approaches to online learning or other emerging initiatives. The materials will need to be used within these activities within the timeframe of the funded project.
- Involving academics on part-time, hourly-paid contracts. You will work directly with academics on part-time, hourly-paid contracts – staff in this situation deliver a sizeable percentage of the undergraduate curriculum in England. You will work directly with them, supporting them in releasing the materials they have created as OER. We would hope to see evidence of OER release and sharing amongst academics on hourly-paid contracts, and evidence that they have been drawn more closely into institutional teaching culture via their involvement in this project.
- Enabling Sustainable practice. You will release or collect materials supporting the development of sustainable activity within higher education, either in terms of the environmental impact of higher education practice and/or in terms of supporting higher education during a time of limited resource availability.
- Preserving the breadth of UK higher education in a time of consolidation. You will release or collect OER material that preserves subject areas and teaching approaches that may otherwise be lost to UK Higher Education.
Theme D: Enhancing the student experience
- Resources to support university applicants. You will release or collect resources supporting the decision making of university applicants (specifically but not limited to the 16-19 age group). These resources will aim to give applicants a flavour of study at a particular course or level, and may also serve to prepare them for higher-level study in this area. One area of interest would be in resources that would introduce prospective students to the idea of online study.
- Drawing on student-produced materials. You will release or collect student produced work (student notes, assessed work, student-developed learning materials) under an open license.
Discussions at the May 2011 Senior Advisory Committee meeting (attended by Allison Littlejohn) highlighted some questions worth evaluating, which are not inherent in phase 2 activities...
Knowledge building
Usefulness of specific types of resources
- Although we may glean some information around types of resources and their usefulness within specific communities this could be something worth investigating further particularly when framed within the context of changes in the HEA subject centres.
- A key evaluation question could be - 'do different subject areas find different types of resoirces useful?' May be worth mapping type of resource with different communities that use these types of resource.
Reward and recognition
- This featured strongly in the pilot phase and is evident in phase 2. Are there specific aspects of this that could be explored further?
- How OER citation might be measured and whether citation could link to reqards/recognition mechanisms?
- There was further discussion on digital scholarship/ digital fluency and how this links to OERs
- Continued evidence re the impact of web 2.0 in use/reuse of OER and impact on reputation.
Students creation/use of OERs
- featured in phase 2 but may be worth being more explicit about both aspects of this in phase 3
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Staff/ student literacies
- links to new Digital Literacies Programme so would be timely addition to phase 3 call.
- LLiDA finding that student literacies are influenced by staff views
- phase 2 not focussed on this issue but may identify issues for further consideration/investigation
Views and practices of librarians
- View and practices of librarians re creation/use/recommendation of OERs- phase 2 OMAC strand may offer some insight
OER evaluation
- It was suggested that one approach would be to mandate trialling/annotation of feedback onto OERs prior to release
- Phase 2 likely to reveal a range of approaches to obtaining feedback - links to quality issue.