Emerging issues from the work of projects in the Phase 2 Collections Strand

The aim of the collections strand was to enhance the discovery and reuse of OER materials, by building collections of materials around particular thematic areas. The idea was to investigate how thematic and subject area presentation of OER material can make resources more discoverable by those working in these areas.

Projects were funded to draw together OER resources for a subject or theme in the following way:

• A static collection of key OER resources at level 1 (first year undergraduate); 
• And a dynamic collection [1] of OER and other resources at more advanced levels (UG levels 2, 3, and PG) syndicated via RSS/atom. Other resources could include open research papers, research data, news stories, key blogs and so on. 

Projects were expected to be closely aligned with relevant subject or thematic networks – for example Academy Subject Centres, professional bodies and national subject associations 

The original Collections strand evaluation questions (for download)

• Findings on Practice Change around collection(s) of open content
• Findings on Development and Release of aggregations of open content
• Findings on Institutional Issues
• Impacts and Benefits observed

Outputs and Deliverables of the Collections strand

Conclusions and Recommendations from project reports have enormous value in their own right and should be consulted for a fuller picture of project activities and recommndations. They are summarised here.

The projects

Delores: Delivering Open Educational Resources for Engineering Design  Created reated static and dynamic collections of university level OERs and other openly available resources relevant to Engineering Design.  The static collection is delivered through a blog. The dynamic collection utilises rule-based facetted classification (developed at Bath) and Bayesian filtering (developed at Heriot-Watt) in order to select those OERs from the wider source collections most relevant to particular topics.

C-SAP: Discovering Collections of Social Science Open Educational Resources Created static and dynamic collections of OERs relating to social research methods using a WordPress blog and customised google search of selected repositories

OeRBITAL: Open educational Resources for Biologists In Teaching And Learning Discipline consultants created a static collections of reviewed OERs in the biosciences, using mediawiki to encourage community formation, uptake, and further development of the resources.

 EALCFO: Engineering a Low Carbon Future OER Created a static and linked dynamic collection of OERs related to low carbon engineering

TRITON: Bringing Open Educational Resources (OER) closer to the Politics and IR subject communities Uses a WordPress blog, Politics In Spires, written by research academics, as a hook to draw users to juxtaposed static and dynamic collections of OERs relating to politics.

OF(GEES): The Open Fieldwork Project Created a static and dynamic collection of OERs using geoparsing to recognise location-specific resources, and accessed through text or map-based search

[1] By “dynamic collection” we mean links to resources which will change automatically over time, for example via an incoming RSS feed.

Project outputs

http://www.sicklecellanaemia.org/OER/index.html - DMU SCOOTER project - OERs and useful guides.

Collections strand synthesis was carried out by isobel Falconer