OER fact sheet CSAPOER2 cascade project

OER factsheet: C-SAP cascade project

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES OF THE OER PROGRAMME

Open Educational Resources Pilot Programme (April 2009-April 2010)

Open Educational Resources phase 2 (August 2010-August 2011)

The OER pilot programme hoped to find some answers to the following questions:

- Which types of OER are used by different stakeholders?

- How far are use patterns influenced by: the subject discipline and/or topic area; type of resources made available?

- How is pedagogy manifested in open content, if at all?

- In what ways, if at all, do learning and teaching practices (need to) change when OERs are widely available?

- What skills/literacies do staff and students need to adapt to using and creating content in an open way?

Funding was awarded to:- 6 institutional projects (primarily repositories)- 8 individual projects- 14 subject strand projects

Within OER phase 2, the Academy and JISC intend to fund projects and activities that:

- Extend the range of materials that are available openly

- Investigate further the benefits offered by OER to all those involved in the learning process

- Enhance the discoverability and reuse of materials

- Offer a greater understanding of the benefits offered by OER release

- Continue the process of cultural change begun in the OER pilot programme.

Funding was awarded to:- 12 projects in strand Ai release- 5 projects in strand Aiii cascade- 6 projects in strand Ci collections

C-SAP is currently working on both cascade and collections strand projects.

OER KEY INITIATIVES (adapted from the “Open Educational Resources: A Global Perspective” presentation, available on the cascade wiki and C-SAP slideshare)

JorunOpen www.jorum.ac.ukJorum provides access to free learning and teaching resources, created and contributed by staff from UK further and higher education institutions. Jorum is a JISC-funded service, run by the two national data centres Mimas and EDINA, and collects and shares learning and teaching materials, allowing their re-use and repurposing. JorumOpen is also a primary repository for all of projects funded within the OER programme.OpenLearn openlearn.open.ac.ukOpenLearn was launched by Open University in October 2006 thanks to a grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The initiative gives free access to Open University course materials (over 8000 study hours). Each of the free study units comes with a range of learning tools, including a discussion forum and a learning diary.

MERLOT www.merlot.org

This content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/ C-SAP, 2010

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

http://www.open.ac.uk/

http://www.open.ac.uk/


MERLOT is a free and open online community of resources designed for faculty, staff and students of higher education, primarily US-based. The repository provides a facility for peer review; furthermore, along with the learning materials, members can contribute assignments and comments to accompany the resources. Authors of the materials can also attach “snapshots” to their resources to provide more depth and description. Importantly, MERLOT does not function as a typical repository – i.e. you cannot upload your files there, only the link to a repository elsewhere (in the case of the pilot project, when releasing material into MERLOT we provided the links to the resources in JorumOpen).

Connexions www.cnx.orgConnexions is a non-profit start-up launched at Rice University in 1999 that aims to provide an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web. The deposited content is organized in small modules that are easily connected into larger collections or courses. All content is free to use and reuse under the Creative Commons "attribution" license. The repository collects materials to support education in K-12, community college, university, continuing education, and industrial training settings.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) ocw.mit.eduMIT OpenCourseWare is a free and openly licensed web-based publication of MIT course content, reflecting almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT. The initiative does not grant degrees or certificates or provide access to MIT faculty. The released materials are organized as courses, and often include course planning materials and evaluation tools as well as thematic content.

KEY POINTS AND BENEFITS OF OERS

Adapted from Thomson, Simon. "A Staff Guide to Open Educational Resources." (2010). http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/100507_36703_OERGuide_singles-HiRes.pdf

OER key points1. OER are free to use and publicly available.2. OER can be used in teaching and learning (usually with attribution to the original

creator).3. The majority of OER can be altered and adapted (‘repurposed’.)4. Using OER is not cheating; in fact it can improve the quality of learning experiences

by building on other people’s work.5. OER development is a global movement6. OER are not just for teachers to use or repurpose; students can be encouraged to

use OER to support their own learning7. Academics can get recognition for their own materials by sharing them as OER or by

being attributed by others through OER release


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How can using OER benefit the student experience?1. OERs let staff can provide access to resources that they wouldn’t be able to offer

without OER (e.g. photos or videos of locations and situations they can’t create/access).

2. OERs enable students to access a range of learning materials encompassing the same content (so as to provide for more learning styles).

3. OERs can be used as a way of building a range of student support resources (e.g. study skills, employability, enterprise, dissertation support).

4. OERs enable prospective students to see more detail of courses before they register.5. OERs allow students to review material and refresh their knowledge and

understanding after they have completed their course

IPR, COPYRIGHT AND CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSING (adapted from Open Educational Resources Infokit https://openeducationalresources.pbworks.com/)

When creating OER material it is important to ensure that any media or content you use does not have any third party copyright or IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) restrictions - or that permission has been granted and recorded for the use of such material.

‘Fair dealing’ (or fair use) is a copyright term that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders. This may apply to some instances in teaching situations (and the widespread tactic of visiting Google Images/YouTube when putting together teaching materials…) but NOT for using in the development of an OER. On the cascade wiki, you will find a number of alternative sources which provide copyright-free digital images, often specifically for educational purposes. Pilot projects have also created a number of useful tools on IPR, copyright and licensing, all of which can be accessed through the JISC Open Educational Resources Infokit.

The advice from JISClegal is to use ‘as open a licence as possible’, i.e. attribution or attribution + share alike. They suggest leaving out the “non-commercial” aspect of the licence as this could have potential restrictions on future innovations based around OER, however there is no consensus around that issue. Further advice will appear shortly in a paper on strategic management of IPR, we will advise on that. Within the framework suggested by JISClegal, you/the reuser would be free:

to copy, distribute, display and perform the work

to make derivative works

as long as these conditions are met:

Attribution: you must give the original author credit.

ShareAlike: if you alter, transform or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a licence identical to this one.


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https://openeducationalresources.pbworks.com/


Creative Commons is not about giving up rights to your work, but making it available under certain conditions. Importantly, creative Commons licenses are non-revocable. Once a resource has been released under a CC-license users are permitted to continue using that resource under the license even if you withdraw it from circulation.

EVALUATION AND SYNTHESIS REPORT http://www.caledonianacademy.net/spaces/oer/

The team of researchers Glasgow Caledonian University provided ongoing evaluation and synthesis throughout the pilot programme, the wiki pulls all of their findings together and addresses how different communities and cultures are progressing towards openness in their shared practice. The report examines social, technical, pedagogical and legal / organisational issues in each strand, and provides a synthesis account detailing barriers and opportunities for change.


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http://www.caledonianacademy.net/spaces/oer/

OER fact sheet CSAPOER2 cascade project

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