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see also

Evidence - OER release publishing models

Evidence - Discovery ReUse and Accessibility

Evidence - Technical/hosting issues

Evidence - OER being adopted and used

Releasing and using OERs

Collections, sectors and subject influences

gaps in subject areas, existing collections, sector influences

Themes strand

CORE-SET (CORE-SET final report) | ReACTOR (ReACTOR Final report) |  Opening up a future in business (Future in business Final Report) | COMC (COMC Final report) | PARIS (PARIS Final Project Report)  HALS OER (HALS OER Final Project Report) | PublishOER (PublishOER final report) | Great Writers (Great Writers Final Report)|  ALTO UK (ALTO UK Final Report)  | ORBIT (ORBIT Final Report) | DEFT (DEFT Final Report)    | FAVOR (FAVOR Final Report) | SESAME (SESAME Final Report) |

OMAC strand

BLOCKeD (BLOCKeD Final Report) |   Digital Literacy and Creativity (Digital Literacy and Creativity Final Report | Academic Practice in Context (Academic Practice in Context Final report) | Teeside Open Learning Units (Teeside Open Learning Units Final Report)

What range of OER exist in your area and what gaps are you addressing?

• Academic leads offered guidance on the main themes to be included. Some of this was determined by their area of expertise, the availability of pre-existing materials, and their views on what would offer a good range of themes and writers.

Further research by the Content Officer established two methods of developing the collections:
     1. Starting from the period-based themes existing Oxford content was assessed to see what was available to populate the collections. Any gaps were identified and then missing materials were created or sourced from other known OER repositories.
     2. The assessment of Oxford content also surfaced high value materials which did not fit with the original themes, but with a little extra effort would make rich collections to add to the website (e.g. a lecture series on D.H. Lawrence was available but he did not feature in the original core collections). (Great Writers Inspire Final Report)

• Student Ambassadors played a significant role in creating and collecting content. They were assigned themes based on their specialism, for example Victorian Poetry and Fiction, and made suggestions to enhance them. Once briefed, they selected content and drafted the contextual essays. In addition, the Student Ambassadors assisted with content capture through the recording and editing of more talks, either specially commissioned to fill gaps or at other Oxford events which matched our themes (e.g. Bodleian Libraries lunchtime lectures on Dickens). (Great Writers Inspire Final Report)
• The project, therefore, focused on practical aspects of interactive teaching and enquiry-based learning, illustrating pedagogical principles through concrete lesson plans and ideas. Consequently, ORBIT materials are hands-on, presenting actual activities within lessons as the primary building blocks, with theoretical ideas embedded within these blocks. We have sought to make this particular approach – a hallmark of effective teacher education – more accessible and tangible. There is also a significant focus on the use of ICT within the subject teaching of mathematics and science, an important emerging area notoriously lacking in effective pedagogical support. (ORBIT Final Report)
•  Usually, these original teaching materials were in paper format although some were in a digital format. It is important to note, however, that all interactive teaching materials were assessed using the adapted OpenLearn production process, as well as using the initial review format which enabled a judgment to be made quickly regarding how much ‘treatment’ a resource would require before it could be uploaded to the resource bank. The treatment of teaching materials included ensuring that each interactive lesson idea was clearly labelled with an appropriate title, had appropriate learning objectives and contained a teaching approach description as well as a clear outline of the lesson idea itself. References to third party materials also needed to be identified as they often required further investigation and possible copyright clearance where necessary. (ORBIT Final report)
• Existing third party OER is readily available in the area of sustainability - Throughout the design process all academic authors working on the creation of new modules successfully collected openly licensed third party materials and included them in their modules. The types and amount vary from module to module, but range from individual images, through to full sections of text and activities adapted or sourced from sites like Open Learn at the Open University, MIT’s Open Courseware Consortium, and Xpert. (PARiS Final Report)
• The Ear Foundation reported less availability of existing OER in their subject area, but regarded the materials they did find as high quality, for example, ‘Hearing’ SD329_1 Advanced from the Open Learn site at the Open University. To counter the lower availability of existing OER, the Ear Foundation worked closely with commercial providers to source content suitable for inclusion, for example, HOPE, the rehabilitation website from the manufacturer Cochlear, which contains hundreds of pre-recorded lectures. (PARiS Final Report)

In what ways have you drawn on existing OER collections in developing and releasing OER?

• Feedback also suggests that using third party OER has allowed content creators to focus on the way they wish to best engage learners with the materials, rather than spending time creating materials. ... Content creators have also been supporting each other in the creation of the sustainability resources and sharing work prior to publication. (PARIS Interim Report)
• The content selected for Great Writers Inspire was harvested from a number of sources, some internal to Oxford and some external. The ingest of content was principally by two methods:
       1. The automatic import of structured metadata via RSS feeds. Audio and video content from Oxford which features on podcasts.ox.ac.uk was tagged for inclusion in Great Writers Inspire within the central media cataloguing system, OXITEMS6. eBooks from the Oxford Text Archive (OTA)7 could also be imported via RSS feed which was tailored to meet the needs of the project. The benefit of automated import is that any new episodes added to either podcasts.ox.ac.uk or the OTA can appear within the Library of Great Writers Inspire without any manual intervention.
       2. Manual input of selected episodes from other sources. Other eBooks, pictures, links to external OERs, and essays had the required metadata added manually within the Drupal system. (Great Writers Inspire Final Report)
•  The general proposition for ORBIT was that it would make existing higher education expertise on teacher education more widely available to other teacher education providers in the HE sector as well as to practising teachers and related educators. In so far as possible, the aim was to make such guidance available in a 'time-proof' way, so that legislative changes would not result in major rewrites of materials; the use of the wiki platform and Creative Commons licence being useful in this respect. To achieve this task a number of clear objectives were set, namely to:
  ●    ensure that relevant and high quality resources from existing and disappearing collections (produced by HEIs, practitioners and governmental agencies) were made openly available to the teacher education and school teacher communities, (ORBIT Final Report)
•  The ORBIT team has worked with the wider UK OER community (see Appendix 2 of the final report for a list of OER/OCW providers from whom we sourced OER materials, plus some of the numerous related conversations and contacts) as well as with teacher educators at other HEIs (see Work Package 3). This liaison work also required creating a list of potential OER providers that were relevant to the interactive teaching requirements of ORBIT materials. (ORBIT Final report)
• Whilst the contact with other teacher education HEIs was not as productive as had been anticipated, it also revealed unexpected instances of materials developed for EU funded primary/secondary facing projects that had been released under a Creative Commons licence thus enabling ORBIT to reuse those OER materials. In addition, while attending the World OER Congress, the Research Associate became aware of a variety of further non-UK based Teacher Education and/or interactive lesson ideas and OER materials on offer from supplementary HEIs elsewhere, e.g. Vyatus Magnus University, Lithuania; Mauritius OER project, etc. (ORBIT Final report)
•  As a result of the investigation into available OER materials or potential interactive teaching resources from other HEIs, the Links index has been established on the ORBIT wiki. In effect, it is a collation of signposts to resources (both OER and some non-OER) for teacher education in the UK, but it also makes reference to international provision where appropriate. It also covers a range of current interactive teaching ideas suitable for use in both primary and secondary STEM subjects. (ORBIT Final report)
•  An emphasis was placed on re-using as much open content as possible throughout the resource bank and enhancing its discoverability. Research has focused not only on these issues but also on measuring the benefits of open academic practice (after Conole, 2012) alongside determining an appraisal of our stakeholders’ perceptions of educational effectiveness. (ORBIT Final report)

In what ways has your particular discipline or sector (eg. FE, NHS, Earth Sciences) has influenced your development and release of OER?

• There are enormous amounts of materials available on the web on literature and writers, however there is a limited number of materials which are released under licences making them suitable for use as OER. Our academic champions have also been debating what should be included in a site called ‘Great Writers Inspire’, preferring to show a representative selection across a range of themes and writers rather than the complete ‘canon’.  As discussed by Emma Smith in her blog post, our academic champions admit to a certain level of discomfort with the title ‘Great Writers’, but have found that it is “a really useful umbrella term, which people can shelter under”. (Great Writers Interim Report)
• Collections show how the resources in an academic context, with contextual essays providing an ‘academic wrapper’ for the items presented.  They demonstrate to the user how items which they may discover in the library could be used. We also acknowledge that some of our collections may be more extensive than others, but that, as long as collections feature the core elements, they still make rich and valuable resources which will inspire the user to discover more. (Great Writers Interim Report)
• Release learning resources with an emphasis on endangered subjects (disciplines which are in decline for a number of reasons – usually those involved with ‘making skills’ such as textiles, ceramics, etc. that are expensive to teach) and student transitions. The project identified and released content related to ceramics, weaving and textile design and fashion communication. ALTO UK Final Report
• During the final stages of the project, an unanticipated challenge was raised by lecturers of the Built Environment which meant the project team had to reconsider one of the eight resources that were to be developed. There had been an adaptation to one of the courses where focus changed from a module on waste management to a more major up-to-date module focused on Grey Water. As the original discussion and decision on the eight resource topics were based on the previous academic year, the project was focusing on the original ‘older’ technologies rather than the new technologies that had developed over the year. This reflects how industry and market changes, can impact dramatically on some modules in the curriculum and highlights that some subject disciplines need very flexible responses when developing resources to incorporate the knowledge and experience that is needed for learners in the workplace environment. The team were able to adapt to this requirement and switched topics - this did not hinder the process of development and allowed the project team to continue as they were, in confidence that they had responded well to changing curriculum needs.(ReACTOR Final report)
  

• The project had to invest time managing partner’s expectations/commercial focus against the research findings of the lecturers and students and therefore what was practical and achievable within the scope of the project. For example, an EU Skills representative noted that the subject areas selected for resource development were all ‘now’ technologies. There are many new technologies coming up in the future including marine, combined heat and power and fuel cells which should perhaps be considered. These technologies did not emerge during the curriculum research phase of the project and were not included in our development plan. This highlights the challenges of responding to expressed needs and balancing these against potential future needs. (ReACTOR Final report)

•  OER/P as a Driver for Rescuing Endangered Subjects
  It was striking that in the workshops for creating our OERs for Weaving and Ceramics that we seriously discussed how such subject courses could be converted for flexible delivery, prior to this, these staff had never considered this as a serious possibility. In North America low residency  masters arts degrees are well established in the ‘making’ subjects including ceramics , although there are few at undergraduate level. Of course, in the UK there is the Open College of the Arts  that is delivering open and distance learning degree courses in arts subjects, including in practical subjects like sculpture.

• Some interesting recent discussions about what OER/P might do to help endangered arts subjects includes the following early ideas:
• Create a generic foundation course for the subject with the collaboration of several institutions to act as an online national ‘knowledge bank’ to preserve knowledge and teaching techniques in the subject for the future

  Work with practitioner communities and schools and colleges etc. to provide access (for a moderate fee) to workshops and studios and instruction to help independent learners to ‘work through’ the practical aspects of the course
  Learners keep a blog as their online portfolio and sketchbook
  Learners pay a moderate fee to:
  Receive guidance and tutoring in the subject
  Have their work assessed and are awarded a certificate and online ‘badge’ by participating institutions that can count towards applying to a formal arts education course ALTO UK Final Report

•  Our Open CourseBook format provides a relatively easy to use and sustainable path for busy academics to create OERs as it uses a structured template to present existing content and benefits from the user-friendly metaphor of a book. For endangered ‘making’ subjects such as ceramics and textiles this looks like a promising means to be able to play a part in the ‘capture’ of the expertise to teach these subjects, in order to preserve them for the future (ALTO Final Report)

• Converting courses in some ADM subjects into OERs, especially in the ‘making’ disciplines (such as ceramics and textiles) and fine art presents some challenges due to a shortage of traditional didactic content compared to STEM subjects. However, we have found that the use of rich media, particularly video, is good for capturing the teaching of technical processes. In addition we have found that using student work and testimonies (on video and in print) can help to capture and illustrate the hidden and invisible elements of teaching and learning on these courses in a useful and meaningful way (ALTO Final Report)

• Working with the publishers has been very interesting and useful and, in common with the other OER phase 3 projects that have a publisher connection, we think this could help develop a ‘mixed economy’ for supporting sustainable OER/P activities in the future. The OER Phase 3 ‘publisher group’ are intending to keep in contact about this and present at the OER13 conference (ALTO Final Report)

• The project also wanted to work with languages which are less widely taught and to engage the wider community in language learning. Our key objectives in asking tutors to participate in the project were to raise awareness of the work of the tutors within their own institutions and the wider academic community, and enhance their professional profiles; to train and upskill tutors in open practice and use of technology, and to establish an online community which would then offer mutual and on-going support for the development and sharing of language teaching materials. These aims did not change throughout the lifetime of the project. (FAVOR Final Report)
  

• Sesame project has produced a rich and sustainable collection of open educational resources (OER), aimed at adult learners and their tutors, but of use to all, across a wide range of subject disciplines. The project has worked with over 150 part-time tutors in the Department for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford to explore how engagement in open practices can help them develop new skills and provide expanded learning opportunities to our students and the wider world. The resources produced are available at: http://open.conted.ox.ac.uk/ for anyone to view, download, repurpose, and incorporate in to their own learning and teaching. (SESAME Final Report)

• From the experience of the OpenSpires project we were aware that original podcasts and videos produced by tutors are good sources to create OER from as, from a copyright perspective, they are less likely to contain contentious pre-existing materials. However, during the Sesame project we found that there are significant barriers (such as the need for recording equipment, knowledge of how to use it, skills to edit recorded material, and resources to produce transcripts) for part-time tutors to overcome in order to produce these resources themselves. While we were able to reduce these barriers to some extent during the Sesame project, for example by investing in recording devices and developed supporting materials to help tutors to use them, this has remained the area where our tutors indicated the greatest desire for additional training and support in our final tutor survey (68% of respondents to our final survey rated their knowledge and skills for producing podcasts as ‘limited’ or ‘none’ and almost all the requests for further training were in this area). (SESAME Final Report)

• The ORBIT project provides materials and information to be used in Initial Teacher Education (ITE), such as the HE based 1-year Post Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) courses in primary or secondary education (or a school-based training programme).
  All materials and outputs are available via the ORBIT wiki: http://orbit.educ.cam.ac.uk.  They focus on the practical aspects of interactive teaching and enquiry-based learning and illustrate pedagogical principles through lesson ideas and plans.  Each lesson idea contains an explicit pedagogical approach - the hallmark of effective teacher education – making them more accessible and tangible for teachers to use.  A carefully selected set of these materials encompassing a wide variety of interactive teaching themes has been collated into a self-contained open digital coursebook:  http://orbit.educ.cam.ac.uk/wiki/ORBIT_Course_Book.  Additionally, users can create their own printable booklet by choosing a selection of teaching resource, for example, on a specific teaching approach or topic area that is relevant to their needs. (ORBIT Final Report)

•  In HALS, subject specialists in biomedical science, forensic science and midwifery acted as a hub to work with external collaborative partners and alongside internal staff (OER novices) to develop interesting and stimulating OER to enhance education and training opportunities. The need for high quality educational resources has also been raised in specific life science subject areas including forensic science (Skills for Justice  ) and midwifery (Department of Health ). (HALS OER Final Project Report)  

What kinds of OER are being adopted and re-used by your collaborators/partners/stakeholders in other sectors and in what ways are they are being developed and used?

• The biggest challenge in evaluation is measuring impact. Surveys, comment boxes and social networking is potentially useful for gaining feedback but is under-used. How do we measure re-use and re-publishing? This is particularly confounded by the fact there is not a clear definition of use or re-use. (HALS OER Interim Report)
• Presentations and handouts have created the most challenges in identifying what might be suitable for open licensing, as these resources are most likely to contain materials with dependent copyright issues.  As a result, our outputs of these types are fewer than we had initially expected. (SESAME Interim Report)
• Self-created podcasts have been popular, with over half of the pilot tutors creating these.  However, early indications suggest that podcasts created by direct recording face-to-face teaching were rarely of a quality that tutors were happy to release.  This was largely due to lack of context – they were perceived as useful for students who missed the class, but not as something they would want to share more widely.  Thus, those tutors who created podcasts about specific teaching points, rather than as a by-product of their face-to-face teaching, were more likely to produce something they were prepared to openly release. (SESAME Interim Report) 
• The project always intended to collate existing OER and other useful online resources for teaching and learning as part of its output, and roughly a third of the resources produced during the pilot are of this type.  Our real challenge here has been finding useful and accurate information about the conditions of use of the linked-to materials, with many websites providing either ambiguous information or none at all.  As a result, the project team has undertaken to check all links and only designate as open content those where we can be certain the material is openly licensed. (SESAME Interim Report)
• Our Rough Guide resources each have an ISBN and practical issues about how to effectively manage this within the context of a Creative Commons Share-Alike license have arisen.  It could be argued that the use of ISBNs in an OER context is not appropriate however the Rough Guides are relatively substantial documents and we have found the ISBN to be an important motivator for potential authors of these resources who are usually experienced L&T academics with multiple calls on their time and competing priorities. (Teeside Open Learning Units Interim Report)
• The development of open 3D resources for the area of Renewable, Environmental and Construction Technology offers a new dimension to support teaching of construction and other related courses in FE and HE. They provide a highly visual simulation of complex technologies, detailing how components work together and might impact on the environment. Feedback at all stages of the project indicate that students and lecturers find these resources improve understanding and are likely to support teaching, revision and distance learners. This is further supported by the resources being open, accessible and available to download on mobile devices.

With a sector moving towards Building Information Modeling (BIM) requirements on all projects, 3d is the best means for visualising and interpreting information and should be the environment we all work in . With a move towards mobile apps in construction and the use of apps on site by site managers and project managers, this is an important part of learning. (Project lead, Leeds Metropolitan University (partner)  (ReACTOR Final report)

• Ensuring that OER can be used on a range of mobile devices takes more effort and resource at the development stage but is likely to have a positive  impact on use, particularly when used by learners, teachers and other partners on site or out in real workplace situations. The OER developed by this project and it’s partners are also of value outside the education sector.   (ReACTOR Final report)

• Open CourseBook
  The authoring and distribution tool we devised as a way of dealing with these challenges has been well received. It is based on a hybrid between 2 existing well-established OER distribution formats that also maximises their benefits:
  i.    MIT OCW, which has the virtue of providing a simple, consistent and reasonably intuitive way of representing an academic course.
  ii.    The Open Textbook concept, which has the advantage of using a well-understood authoring metaphor – the ‘book’, together with the ability to be distributed in PDF format so that it ‘plays’ on nearly all platforms and operating systems. This has the following advantages:
  •    Enables the easy reuse of existing of course information and documentation
  •    Provides a contextual and pedagogic ‘container’ to hold the supporting resources (texts, images, videos, web resources, textbook extracts etc.)
  •    Has a relatively low technical threshold (uses Word for authoring)
  •    Can be accessed online but also downloaded and used offline – an important consideration.
  •    Importantly, the metaphor of the book is easily understood by teachers and can be used to tell the ‘story’ of the course’, with the use of the timeline providing the narrative arc.
  •    The production of an Open Coursebook involves specifying the course aims, objective, learning outcomes and assessment criteria etc. – all available from existing internal documentation. It also records what happens when, where, with whom and what resources are involved – all essential elements of the IMS Learning Design specification . But also essential elements required to ‘capture’ a course in order to redesign it for flexible delivery
  •    It provides a gentle introduction to the design skills needed to support flexible delivery
  ALTO UK Final Report
• Using Video to Capture and Share Workshop and Studio Processes ALTO UK Final Report
•  The Video Sketchbook
  The idea here is that the ‘invisible’ 1-2-1 learning and group work that typically occurs in an Art and Design course can be represented by student testimonies about their experiences using their sketchbooks as prompts (the ‘video sketchbook walkthrough’) as well as talking about their own produced artworks. This can be done by the students themselves as shown here link, or in conjunction with a tutor – a kind of video ‘walkthrough’ where the student and tutor talk about the work and the course – this example link provides a good description of a student and tutor discussing progress from initial ideas through to a finished product. Some educationalists recognise this method of learning as ‘vicarious learning’ i.e. learning through the experience of others (Mayes et al, 2001). ALTO UK Final Report
• OER as a Digital Literacy Diagnostic Tool ALTO UK Final Report
•  Overall, responses from project participants indicated high levels of re-use, especially with regard to online teaching materials from teaching resource banks such as TeachFind and Teachernet; at the same time, only a small minority indicated any familiarity with the concept of Open Educational Resources. A number of participants mentioned their frustration with the teaching resource banks arguing that resources were often not described in a way that met their needs - for instance, they mentioned they would like to be able to search for resources in a specific curriculum area. They also mentioned they would like to be able to filter the search results according to assessment objectives, levels (i.e. primary/secondary) and provenance (UK vs non-UK); they also wanted to have an indication of whether the resource was visual/auditory/kinaesthetic so that they could best adapt it to their teaching needs. Given that lack of description is one of the key barriers to reuse of Open Educational Resources (Conole and Adams, 2010), these issues should be addressed as a matter of priority to improve the uptake of OERs within the school sector. (DeFT Final Report)
• The project worked with part-time language tutors across five universities (Aston, Newcastle, UCL SSEES, SOAS and Southampton) to create and publish more than 340 new open educational resources for students. Resources are in at least 18 languages and are free to download, use and adapt. Materials include teaching activities and new resources which give prospective students a ‘flavour’ of language study at university.   (FAVOR Final Report)
• Our plan was to engage a number of hourly-paid language tutors, from 5 different HEIs, in publishing their language teaching resources as open content, and in creating a suite of new open educational resources designed to assist prospective students in understanding the nature of language study at HE level. This material would also provide ‘language tasters’ which would promote interest in language learning among a wider group of potential learners.   (FAVOR Final Report)
• a significant proportion of the content to be delivered by Great Writers Inspire would be audio, video and ebooks (Great Writers Inspire Final Report)
• External audio and video was placed under the ‘Other’ category of content within collections. These materials often had additional resources placed around them (e.g. forum, q & a, reading lists, transcriptions) which were considered valuable and would be lost if placed within the audio or video categories. Also, not all will play in an iframe so a link is placed on the episode page, reinforcing the fact that the material is from another OER provider. (Great Writers Inspire Final Report)
• Great Writers Inspire adds value to pre-existing OER by placing them in the writer and theme context. The essays in particular help with this by providing an ‘academic wrapper’ which links the episodes. Users are also presented with ‘related collections’ which offer extra context of broader collections to explore. The novelty of this project was not simply providing the materials online but gathering the materials in contextual collections, making them more accessible and discoverable.  (Great Writers Inspire Final Report)
• A particular focus for the project was the inclusion of eBooks. This is a potentially huge area so simple, tentative steps have been taken within the project timeframe. As part of the discussions with academics, teachers and students, interesting findings included:
• ebooks are good to read from but not good to quote from. To be of more use to students and researchers it would be nice to click through from a passage in the ebook to the original facsimile text, so that the correct reference can be used.
• The ability to make draw-on annotations is required (in a similar way that you would annotate a physical text).
• It is essential to have information on the edition and reflect the bibliographical information about the actual book – i.e. which edition, where and when published etc.
• The ability to download all texts on to a portable device was seen as a particular benefit, particularly for students with limited access to a campus library
• Making ebook versions of more esoteric texts make them more widely available to a larger audience (Great Writers Inspire Final Report)
• In terms of the types of outputs generated by our tutors, these remained fairly consistent throughout the project. We had fewer presentations than handouts, probably due to the greater legacy copyright issues in many presentations. We also had more image collections than initially anticipated, reflecting how many tutors do teach with their own images and are happy to share these. Links were the largest single type of content (although this is somewhat skewed by the subject collections that contain only links). Video was less popular than audio content as only a few tutors felt they had the skills necessary to produce videos to a standard they would be happy to share. This last factor was also an issue in the type of audio content produced, as while a few tutors experimented with recording teaching sessions, very few were happy to release these, preferring shorter more-focused podcasts they had created especially for release. While this has probably resulted in higher-quality podcasts overall it did mean fewer were produced than we might have anticipated at the start of the project. (SESAME Final Report)
• Through establishing an OER resource bank and producing an open coursebook, it has made existing HE expertise on teacher education more widely available to other HE providers, to other project stakeholders including teachers themselves, and to related educational professionals.(ORBIT Final Report) 
• The resources published took the form of ten 10-credit modules in the area of sustainability from different subject perspectives. The subject areas involved were: Business, Geography, Arts and Humanities, Engineering, Careers and the Employability Service. The modules created were embedded within the taught curriculum at Nottingham, specifically within the Nottingham Advantage Award1, an optional programme for undergraduates focussed on creating and improving skills that employers are looking for in talented new graduates. (PARiS Final report)