Beyond Content –thoughts and reflections from OER programme briefing meeting

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If I could use two sentences to describe what I have understood about the JISC/HEA Open Educational Resources Programme at the briefing meeting in Birmingham last week, these would be:

  1. the programme will make a wide range UK HE educational resources freely available with minimum technical requirements and by using various platforms and tools; and
  2. the programme will look for culture change, sustainable processes and institutional policies.

This one year pilot programme is to explore what works, what doesn’t work and to seek best practices in promoting free accessing, reusing and sharing educational resources. Further information about presentations and discussions on the breifing day are avalailbe at Lorna’s blog. It is clear that proposers are not only being asked to set a goal of publishing (x) number of open courses on (x) platform, they are also required to go deeper into thinking of and planning something more than content.

I don’t really know how potential bidders will actually plan something to address issues beyond content but I would like to share some initial thoughts and reflections from the meeting:

Firstly, OER and the culture of sharing. It is clear that simply publishing teaching materials online for others to have free access will not be enough to change cultures and teaching practices. The value of OER will not be best achieved through static resources, but rather through their potential to engage a wide range of educators and learners to share ideas and expertise, and collaborative knowledge building. Therefore, institutions should not only require staff to develop content for the use of others, but also encourage them to use content created and modified by others in order to improve our collective knowledge and improve the quality of teaching and learning at universities as a whole. I think a culture of openness and sharing will only emerge when OER has embedded and become an integral part of teaching practice and learning process in HE.

Secondly, sustainability and community building. One question was raised at the discussion concerning the situation in which a person involved in an OER project moves from one university to another – who would continue updating the content? One participant suggested that if the content was on open domain then he/she should be able to continue working on such content no matter which university he/she would work for. This suggests that when institutions think about how to sustain the OER they should not only focus on further funding for the project but also on the need to explore the opportunities for community building. It is important that institutions should invest in people who produce and use the content, as well as establish a new kind of shared ownership of learning material with a grassroots community to keep content alive and updated.

Finally, IPR and copyright policy. This is something that everyone is talking about. Many questions and issues were raised at the meeting. One of the participants asked a question: Could there be a standard institutional IPR and copyright policy which supports OERs so that institutions only need to sign an agreement? It seems a good idea but it is not practical or possible to do so at the moment, at least for this programme. Therefore, institutions will need to review their policies and make their own decision on how to support free and open access to teaching and learning materials. Clearly, an institution will need a deep commitment to openness and a strategic approach in order to make teaching and learning resources truly open and shareable and bring the desired changes to teaching and learning practices.

If you are interested in the JISC/HEA OER programme or would like to share your thoughts and discuss some issues related to OER projects, please join us at the CETIS OER/OU OpenLearn meeting at Open University on 27th February. Further information and online registration for the event is available at http://jisc.cetis.org.uk/events/register.php?id=164.

Free and Open as a Business Model in HE?

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The next JISC CETIS Educational Content SIG meeting, a joint CETIS/OpenLearn event on Open Educational Resources, will be held at the Open University in Milton Keynes on Friday 27 February 2009. The meeting will include presentations from a range of existing OER projects in order to share their experiences and lessons learned. It will also provide an opportunity for potential bidders to ask questions and discuss issues related to the JISC/HEA OER programme call. Furthermore, we would like to invite you to join the discussion to express your interests and share your thoughts on how and what activities that any potential CETIS OER working group(s) should undertake in order to support the OER programme and the wider OER community.

Further information on the event is available at http://wiki.cetis.org.uk/EC-SIG-OER_270209 with online registration available at http://jisc.cetis.org.uk/events/register.php?id=164.

Free and Open as a Business Model in HE?

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Last week, my son told me that he and his friends had decided that each of them must learn a programming language and make videos to teach other people on their website. He said that he would like to learn JavaScript first. I gave him a book on JavaScript which I bought some time ago and let him to have a look at. He followed the instructions and started to write his very first code. He sent the “cool stuff” he had just made to his friend. His friend loved it and asked him how he did this. My son told him which book he used and promised to bring it to the school next day. A few minutes later, this friend sent him a message “Haha…, downloaded the whole book in five minutes.” My son moaned “who would buy it for 30 quid if you can get it for free?” I was amused by how quickly this 11 year old boy got what he wanted from the internet without spending a penny.

According to Chris Anderson in a podcast, “the great Internet: Free for All” (see Lorna’s blog), people under 25 years old believe that everything on the internet is going to be free whereas people beyond that age may not. He argues that free may be the better way of doing business as opposed to charging users for goods and services in the future. The notion of this new business model is to give away 99% of your products to most people for free but charge for 1% of products for profit from a small number of dedicated users. This results in the majority of users benefiting from free products and services and the charged users being happy with what they have paid for.

How would this industrial economic model affect and apply to higher education provision and the HE market? Can a university give away 99% of its courses for free and still make a profit? What new services and functions should universities provide to attract students when all the course materials are freely available online? What different business models are needed to diversify their income sources? Influenced by the success of Open Sources Software Movement, MIT OpenCourseware, OU OpenLearn and many other universities around the world have started to provide free access to courses for students, educators and self-learners. However, sustainability and scalability have become a big challenge for most OER initiatives once huge foundation funding goes away. Can free and open become one of core business models in HE in the same way we have seen in software, music and the game industry? Perhaps, the HEFCE/Academy/JISC Open Educational Resources Programme provides a good starting point for institutions to think about these questions and develop new approaches for higher education provision in the digital age. It is important that institutions will need to identify their own business case and explore new business models to make Open Educational Resources more sustainable/scalable. Lou McGill and her colleague have conducted a study which examined various business cases for sharing learning materials and provided some possible future business models for institutions to engage with open educational resources. This report is available at http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/265/.

Open Educational Resources programme: call for projects

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Bidding for the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) funded  Open Educational Resources (OER) programme is now open. This pilot programme will be managed jointly by JISC and the HEA and projects will run for 12 months. There will be three separate project strands to the programme: Institutional, Subject Area and Individual. The goal of the programme is to make a wide range of learning resources freely available and easily discoverable so that they may be routinely re-used by both educators and learners. For further details about the grant funding call and associated documentation, please visit: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities/funding_calls/2008/12/grant1408.aspx

Technology-based Innovation as a Transformative Agent – Forward with Institutional Change

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Institutional Transformation was one of the themes at last year’s JISC online conference which focused on how current teaching and learning has been transformed as a result of e-learning and how this impacts on institutions and learners. This year’s conference, a session on œAchieving transformational change – making it happen has taken this further with a focus on practical approaches and the change process to an institution-wide transformation. Two presenters, Mark Stiles from at Staffordshire University and Peter Bullen from at the University of Hertfordshire, both reflected on the approaches taken within their institutions using technology to achieve transformational change. Peter outlined their experience in the CABLE project (Change academy for blended learning enhancement) as a process to help support and achieve transformational change in learning and teaching. In his presentation, Mark pointed out that “the very act of embedding had become a barrier to innovation” and discussed approaches that have been developed and used by the new JISC ENABLE project, funded under the Institutional Approaches to Curriculum Design programme which aimed to promote institution-wide changes. Many thoughtful questions and discussion on the processes and approaches which could encourage the continuation of innovations and changes at institutional, departmental and individual levels have emerged. A selection of these are as follows:

  1. Getting started with measurables: œif you are trying to change, or transform something then you need to know if you are on the path to achieving it. Therefore you need to be able to describe what you are trying to achieve – what it looks like, feels like etc. and you need to have some descriptors that you can ˜measure. In the discussion of measuring transformation, Peter gave an example of how CABLE is trying to measure the impact of blended learning on different stakeholders. He continued, œits difficult as we tend to think about measures of impact on students in terms of global measures such as pass rates or retention rates or we can go to the other end of the spectrum and look at number of logs in, to discussions for example. Maybe we should look at some way of measuring what’s changed in the classroom as a measure of change in Blended Learning. This view was echoed by Mark and he added, ” one of the big problems is we tend to measure things which are easy to mend, rather than focusing on what we need to understand more about”.
  2. Collaboration is essential for transformation: Collaboration seems vital for transformation across a whole institution. Peter outlined the CABLE approach which aims to integrate blended learning into practice “ across the institution – rather than it remaining as an ˜add on. In order to do so, they involved project teams at the school (i.e. department) level in a structured process to collaborate, share practice and develop working relationships. However, Mark argues that one cannot “legislate” for collaboration, rather the processes for “joining things up” and “seeing the big picture” are needed to ensure collaboration within the institutions. He pointed out that the lack of alignment at Universities, in governments and from funding bodies can be seen as a big problem. He suggested that alignment between all the varying similar initiatives is really important and the big thing seems to be promoting a culture of “shared vision”.
  3. Issues of œownership: a discussion on œownershipœ was initiated by Mark, who noted that œat the institutional level, tensions between innovation and control can focus around ownership”. He continued, œits classic large organisation issues¦ Local initiatives often start up because of a perceived problem with the central organisational structure or processes. Again, this discussion went back to a shared vision and how different groups should understand it and fit/work within the organisation. Mark gave an example of how Staffordshire University Executive have taken ENABLE to heart and are promoting it as a University initiative with their full weight behind it, rather than as a “JISC project”.

Then, the discussion went back to the starting question: œWhat is transformation? Peter believes that, œtransforming implies big change – transformation for me is the integration of the use of technology with face-to-face teaching. Mark suggests that innovation can be a “step-change”, which is challenging both to organisations and their culture(s) – this is transformative but high risk. On the other hand, innovation can also be gradual, i.e. from small changes amounting to a big change. This approach is less risky but less likely to be transformative.

Finally, here is a question raised during the discussion that I thought it would be worth everyone in the HE sector thinking about: œIf you could change one thing to transform your institution, what would it be? On next years JISC online conference, I hope we will hear more interesting transformation stories on how technology has been used to achieve transformational change.

POCKET Workshop

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I attended the POCKET (Project on Open Content Knowledge Exposition and Teaching) workshop last Thursday at the University of Derby. This event was particularly timely as HEFCE just announced an initial £5.7 million of funding for pilot projects on Open Educational Content in higher education institutions early last week. The workshop was started by Patrick McAndrew and Tina Wilson from the Open University who gave an overview of Openlearn, the workflow of open content creation and things to consider before starting an Open Educational Content project. Then we worked in groups to look at how to convert an existing course onto OpenLearn and what were the key issues that needed to be addressed.

In the afternoon session, Sarah Darley, from University of Derby, Roy Attwood from University of Bolton and Mike Jeffries-Harris from University of Exeter presented some course units they have put onto Openlearn. What was most interesting to me was Roys experience in transferring existing open content to the OpenLearn platform as an academic. He has spent the entire summer reading the XML books borrowed from the library and OU XML downloaded from OpenLearn. However, he finally found that in order to upload your course to OpenLearn, you dont have to learn XML at all, rather the easiest way is just to download a course unit from Openlearn, delete the original content and then copy and paste your own content in. I hope his experience and tips will really help those who may be thinking about putting their course onto OpenLearn.

We also explored some tools used by OpenLearn, such as FM (Video conferencing), Compendium (Knowledge Maps) and Learning Journal, etc. Tina demonstrated some examples of how Compendium is being used by educators and learners to present ideas and organise large amounts of information and resources on the web. I have just downloaded the Compendium software a few weeks ago and was hoping to create a knowledge map for Open Educational Resources which could display key concepts and issues of OER movement, visual thinking and discussing process and make accessing to various sorts of resources directly via the map.

The POCKET project is also keen to expand the existing partnership, seek partners to join this initiative and provide support and guidance for individuals and institutions to convert their courses to OpenLearn. It is expected that learners and academics at HEIs in the UK would benefit from an enlarged pool of Open educational resources. For more information about the project and workshop, please visit the POCKET web site.

Copyright and the move towards Open Content

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My son has spent several days taking pictures and making videos of his hamsters. He finally put these on his school home page at Fronter and showed it to me. He wrote some interesting stories about his hamsters together with those lovely pictures of them. I believe that other kids would love them. It was a pity that the Fronter doesnt support videos at the moment so he had to upload all the video clips to Youtube and put a link on his webpage. What was most interesting to me was a footnote under the pictures: œPlease feel free to copy it, please dont claim these are your own hamsters. When he realised that I was reading this, he was serious and asked œthis is copyright, isnt it?

Copyright was high on the agenda of the recent JISC RePRODUCE (Re-purposing & Re-use of Digital University-Level Content and Evaluation) programme meeting. More than 20 people from different projects which were funded to develop and run high quality technology enhanced courses using reused and repurposed learning materials sourced externally to their institution gathered together. Liam Earney from the CASPER project (Copyright Advice and Support Project for Electronic Resources) gave a presentation on updates and reflections from the project and how CASPER could help the RePRODUCE projects to engage with all of the issues related to IPR and copyright. The questions and issues in relation to copyright that were raised and discussed included:

  1. Lack of awareness of copyright issues among academics. I cant say for sure, but certainly in my experience most academics are willing to share their work with colleagues within or outside their own institutions but most of them are not clear about what they can or cannot do on third party copyrights. Some are not willing to devote scarce time and resources to obtain permission to use the work of others.
  2. Risk of using unauthorised materials for electronic course materials. Some projects reported they have incorporated copyrighted third-party content in creating the course materials for using within the university. However, if putting these courses on the internet for repurposing and reusing in public, do they have to find ˜clean versions, free of copyrighted elements which are often difficult and expensive? What are the risks that institutions face for using third party copyright materials?
  3. Guidance for institutions on how to handle IPR and copyright for digital teaching materials. Few institutions have developed a clear and explicit policy on IPR management and copyright issues. It was agreed that institutions should set policy on IPR and copyrights as a matter of urgency.

As Helen Beetham from JISC pointed out at the project self-evaluation session on the RePRODUCE programme meeting, it is not only about what contents have been re-purposed and re-used by each project but also what lessons we can draw from these projects. Inevitably, copyright plays a major part in the process of provision open access to publication and teaching and learning resources.

Access to Research Resources for Teachers Space (ARRTs) project

Before joining JISC CETIS I worked on a repository project – ARRTs (Access to Research Resources for Teachers Space) for the General Teaching Council for Northern Ireland. The project was to set up a repository to make relevant research publications available to educational professionals “at the touch of a button” (it was initially funded for 9 months then extended to 18 months). As a research officer, two thirds of my time was involved in dealing with issues of copyright and IPR. Although this repository was focused on educational research related publications rather than teaching and learning materials, I think the approaches, processes and issues we have to deal with on IPR and copyright would be similar. Here is a brief summary of my experience on getting permission for mounting third-party copyright publications and students theses onto the repository.

  1. Permissions from funding bodies and organisations: At the beginning, the project team sent letters to 40 funding bodies and organisations in Northern Ireland (including relevant organisations from other parts of the UK) which have funded educational research projects and held the copyright of these publications. After several follow-up letters and many telephone discussions, we were finally granted permissions from more than 35 organisations.
  2. Permission from individual academics: After gaining permissions from funding bodies, we then sent a standardised copyright clearance letter to individual authors seeking permission to mount their reports and papers onto ARRTs repository. It was a nice surprise to find that of the 200+ academics we contacted all granted permissions to publish their work onto the repository.
  3. Permissions from Journals: We contacted ten publishers (when authors sent in their paper wishing to upload them onto the repository but permission had to be sought from the journals). Regrettably, we received a positive response from only one journal granting us permission to upload any paper we wished onto the repository.
  4. Permissions from institutions: In addition to research reports and academic papers, the project was designed to include all PhD and Masters theses in the Education departments of the four local institutions onto the repository (at the moment, most of them are lying on the shelves in libraries and hardly used by researchers and practitioners). We set up several meetings with colleagues from the institutions with the purpose of gaining institutional permissions to upload these theses onto the repository. Although all the participants thought this was a good idea and wished to take the action forward, the institutional approval process was very slow. By the end of the project, we had only received writing permission from one institution.

Our experience shows that both funding bodies and academics are positive on giving permission to disseminate and share the research outcomes and data to a broader audiences and users through the repository. However, publishers are wary and most of them are still hostile to open access due to the issues and problems the industry faces. Many institutions dont have clear policies on who should be responsible for copyright and IPR issues and pass the responsibility to library staff. There is an urgent need for more efficient and cost effective mechanisms and methods to copyright clearance and permissions.

It could be anticipated that IPR and copyright issues will move up the agenda of key issues as more and more OER development takes place. In particular, with the forthcoming Open Educational Content call. JISC has already funded several projects to look at the issues and provide guidance and useful tools for researchers, lecturers and institutions to deal with IPR and copyright issues. For example, by accessing the RoMEO (Publisher’s copyright & archiving policies) website, you can check a publishers default policy and permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher’s copyright transfer agreement. The Web2Rights project provides a basic IP toolkit for projects engaging with Web2.0 technologies and emerging legal issues. JISC-SURF Partnering on Copyright programme has looked at University Copyright Policies and developed a set of Practical Guidelines suitable for HEI in the UK. As open educational content projects continue to evolve and expand, researchers, lecturers, students and institutions will inter-relate with IPR and copyright issues as never before. The protection offered to research papers, teaching and learning materials by copyright law is in excess of what is required by most academics who think about open and sharing resources in education. More efforts will be needed to address the challenging questions in order to adapt innovative approaches to educational content creation, reusing and sharing.

I have no intention to talk about the complexity of the copyright issues to an 11 year old child but I might introduce him to Creative Commons and see if he could use it for sharing his work with others over the internet. It may be better to leave some spaces for children to try their own ways to the solution when they have opportunities to think about the same issues as adults. The truth of the matter is that by the time the Youtube generation grows up, there will be a much higher demand for open access to educational resources by learners and reusing and sharing teaching materials among academics. It is clear that deep changes are needed to promote educational ˜fair use in normal copyright law. I hope that some of the barriers we encountered today will not be a problem in the future.

Social Learning Zone, PLE and Cooperativeâ Curriculum Designing for Change

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I attended the opening of the Social Learning Zone at the University of Bolton last week. Everyone was impressed by the exciting œone stop shop facilities for students in the campus which brings together a traditional library, 24 hours access to a computer room and a café. In the social learning zone, students are able to bring books in from the library, have access to wireless technology to use their lap-tops and mobile phones and can discuss projects with fellows or tutors in a relaxed environment. As the Vice Chancellor, Dr George Holmes, stated in his opening address: ˜Students at Bolton are the very heart of the university¦ Academic staff develop their understanding and critical thinking that expands the minds of students to create new knowledge. But without the facilities and infrastructure, the pulse is less quickened. The Social Learning Zone that we are in today provides that environment.

The social learning zone is another step forward for the university to shift from an institutional approach to a more learner centred approach to learning and to take into account how students like to work nowadays. To me, this initiative is in line with another two ongoing technology related projects at the University of Bolton.

One is PLE project in which learners can configure different services and preferred tools to develope their personal systems (Personal Learning Environments) in order to bring together informal learning from the home and the workplace, as well as more formal provision by education institutions.

The other is the newly funded JISC curriculum design project which adopts a ˜cooperative model to develop a professional curriculum within the community that meets the needs of the learner and their organisation and supports work-based learning and inquiry-based learning.

It is clear all these programmes are designed with the intention of changing methods of traditional teaching and learning in the university and exploring different ways to increase the effectiveness of teaching programmes. In particular, they aim to enhance the learners learning experience. However, the learning environment, technology and even new curricula do not really bring changes on their own, so what is necessary for desired changes to take place?

Given the complexity of educational change, this will be a much longer and more complicated process and needs to consider organisational, cultural and pedagogical issues within an institution. For example, how do we define knowledge and learning? How do we assess outcomes of learning and in what way do we acquire accreditation? It also needs to take into account wider economic and social change. As Graham Attwell in his article suggested, œit is not educational technology per se that will shape the future of education but wider usage of technology in different spheres of society including in production and work processes and in changing processes of knowledge creation and development that will challenge traditional models of teaching and learning. Thus it is the way we use technology which will shape the social interaction of learning and may lead to profound changes in educational processes and institutions.

Technological innovations have not revolutionised educational institutions yet. However, the current trend towards social learning and personalised learning through networking, social software and tools in higher education has meant that the emphasis has shifted away from promoting effective teaching towards developing an improved understanding of how students learn. There is no doubt that the universities which will thrive are those which treat students more like consumers and adapt to the new just-in-time technology with student-centredness and on-demand approaches to the delivery of education..

I am really interested to know how the social learning zone will be used by students and lecturers at Bolton to develop new learning opportunities and skills and create new knowledge.

Managing Quality of Course Resources in Repositories

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Quality is the primary concern for most people looking for teaching and learning materials from open educational resources and repositories. Phil in his blog has indicated the difficulties in creating high quality materials for individual lectures, in measuring what we mean by the term ˜good and in communicating the results so people know where to look for the resources they need. In the OER briefing paper, we discussed several approaches that have been used by OER initiatives in dealing with quality management issues, such as MITs and OpenLearns institution-based approach, the peer review approach for Open Source Software projects and Open Access journals and Rice Connexions open users review approach.

Recently, a colleague pointed me to the National High Quality Course Resources Repository in China and told me how these resources had been developed and selected from different institutions throughout China and used by other educators and learners within the country. It seemed to me that this is quite a different approach to quality assessment and enhancement that might be worth looking at for developing large scale OER initiatives and national repositories. I then spent some time to explore relevant websites for the programme and the resources in the repository. Here are some of my findings and thoughts that I would like to share with people who might be interested.

In 2003, the Chinese Ministry of Education launched the œNational Excellent Courses for Higher Education programme, which aimed to encourage institutions in developing and sharing high quality course resources and improving the quality of teaching and learning in HE as a whole. Each year, institutions submit their best courses to the National Centre for Excellent Courses in HE. The centre uploads all the courses on the website and invites the public to vote. The highly rated courses (around 80% of all submitted courses) enter to the next selection process “ expert reviews. Around 20% of courses are recommended as national excellent courses through reviews by expert panels drawn from different subjects and the results are published via various communications channels. Those selected include syllabi, lecture notes, videos and courseware and are mounted into the National Excellent Courses Resources Repository for educators and learners to re-use and re-purpose in their own teaching and learning. The individuals, faculties and institutions who developed the courses receive funding for their work so that they can further invest in the courses or develop other courses. From 2003 to 2007, 1,798 courses were developed and awarded the ˜excellent title and it is expected that another 4,000 courses will be made available from 2008 to 2010.

This centralised selection approach gives us an example of a large scale and long term quality assurance mechanism for OER and repositories at a national level. In particular, this approach might help to address the quality issues for creating, assessing and reusing resources in large repositories and OERs.

  1. Quality of the materials: ideally, the courses selected and stored in the national repository should be the best in their subject areas as a result of the comprehensive submission and selection process, from subject groups, faculties, and institutions to provincial and national levels, public rates and expert reviews. Most importantly, all the courses submitted, and not just those that are selected, should be well-designed and prepared as they are showcases for other resources in their own institutions repository as well as advertising their courses.
  2. Measurement and assessment of the quality of course resources: both users views and subject experts views are considered to decide what course resources are good and useful to other people.
  3. Communication results and promoting sharing: As a national annual programme, many people in HE are involved in developing courses resources or participating in the selection processes. Institutions, faculties and individuals pay attention to the new courses submitted, selected and published each year and know where to find the resources when they need them.
  4. Value for money: faculties and institutions need to invest in course resources so the funds only go to those courses which are selected. The funding bodies are more confident about which resources they should fund in terms of the quality of the resources and how they may be reused and shared by others. For institutions, encouraging individual and faculties to create and develop high quality courses not only secures further funding but also improves the quality of resources in their own repository.

Unfortunately, I was not able to access to the course resources in the repository from outside China. However, I finally found that some courses have been translated into English and published on China Open Resources for Education (CORE) website. I therefore explored several courses on this site, such as Traditional Chinese Culture Course which was produced by educators from Northwest University. The course resources include a course description, teaching plan, teaching materials assessment, reading list, teaching video and multimedia courseware. However, I had difficulty downloading the videos and multimedia courseware. I then looked at the lists of excellent courses from 2003 to 2007 published on the National Centre for Excellent Courses on the HE website and recognized several well-known experts in educational technology field in China who have been involved in developing courses. I believe that most novice lecturers or learners who teach and study educational technology, in particular educators and learners in under-developed areas in China, would wish to access and reuse these resources, and watch teaching videos. The centre for national excellent course resources website which publishes course information and links to the resources has 0.2 million views per day and the repository for storing the excellent course resources for reusing and sharing receives 0.4 million views per day.

A briefing paper on Open Educational Resources

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Recently, I have been working with my colleagues, Sheila and Wilbert, looking at the latest developments and trends in Open Educational Resources (OER) initiatives worldwide. JISC has a long term record of interest in sharing and re-using digital content and has already supported many institutional repository projects in the provision of free access to teaching and learning materials in HE/FE (such as Jorum). It appears that OER will have a significant impact on managing and accessing the existing repositories and in taking these initiatives forward as part of a global movement. We thought it might be useful to carry out a review of OERs that might benefit the JISC community in planning funding programs and in opening up discussions on future research directions concerning the use and re-use of digital content.

The work took much longer than we expected due to the complexity and rapid development of OERs. In the last few months, we have studied several well“known OER projects, such as MIT OCW, OpenLearn, Rice Connexions and have drawn invaluable lessons from them. We have reviewed a number of large scale studies on OERs to help gain a better understanding of the main issues in the field. In addition, by following OER blogs , David Wileys and Stephen Downes s blogs, we have been able to draw upon the latest thinking and debates on major issues. We also had a number of discussions with colleagues in CETIS, such as Phil and Lorna, and they have given us lots of valuable suggestions. We finally produced an OER briefing paper as a quick introduction to funding bodies, institutions and educators who are interested in OER initiatives. The paper includes three sections: a) the conceptual and contextual issues of Open Educational Resources; b) current OER initiatives: their scale, approaches, main issues and challenges; and c) trends emerging in Open Educational Resources, with respect to future research and activities.

The briefing paper is an initial attempt to get some input from the wider JISC community and get further debate started around the OER initiatives. It is intended to be a fluid document since the landscape on this subject is changing so rapidly at present. One of the ways we would like to keep it current would be to draw a group of people who are interested in OER together to continue to explore the issues, to share some thoughts and to participate in our discussions. Please contact Li Yuan (l.yuan@bolton.ac.uk or 01204903851) for more information about Open Content working group and further events at CETIS.