The Cetis13 Conference is just days away and excitement is mounting to fever pitch. Or something. Sadly, if you haven’t already booked your place at the conference, you’ve missed the boat. Don’t despair though! You can still follow the fun on twitter, #cetis13, and this year we will also be streaming our two keynotes, “Digital Citizenship and Open Social”
by Josie Fraser and “The Path to Open Learning is Paved with Good Intentions” by Professor Patrick McAndrew. You can find the livestream here http://jisc.cetis.org.uk/cetis13live

This year, for our sins, Phil and I are running the following session:

Open Practice and OER Sustainability

HEFCE funding of the HE Academy/JISC Open Educational Resources programme has come to an end, but this should not mean the end of UK OER. The emphasis of the programme was always on sustainable release of resources and change in culture and practice, not a one-off dumping of teaching materials. Through the programme we have seen changes in approaches to the management of learning resources, learned about how they can be disseminated openly, and embarked on new practices in Open Education that go well beyond (and occasionally do not even include) open access to learning materials.

In this session we will reflect on some of these changes and new approaches, with an emphasis on which are sustainable and how various technologies might help with sustainability. A good starting point for discussion would be “Technology for open educational resources – Into the wild” which reflects on several areas covered during the UK OER programme, though there are also many issues worth discussing that are not well covered in that book, for example management of the creation of OERs and practices in Open Education.

When Phil, Martin and I were initially planning this session we drew up a wish-list of people that we knew would be able to make a really thoughtful contribution to the debate. Based on the assumption that maybe only about half of our dream team would be able to participate, we e-mailed a dozen speakers and were <cliche>stunned and delighted</cliche> when almost everyone said yes! So we are now in the enviable position of having ten of the UK’s most challenging and thought provoking open education thinkers presenting in the space of just over three hours. Just look at our lineup….

• David Kernohan (Jisc)
• Joe Wilson (SQA)
• Sarah Currier (Jorum/Mimas)
• Yvonne Howard (ePrints Edshare / Humbox / Southampton)
• Suzanne Hardy (Medev / Newcastle)
• Pat Lockley (pgogy)
• Marion Manton (Oxford)
• Julian Tenney (Nottingham)
• Nick Sheppard (Leeds Met)
• Amber Thomas (Warwick)

We haven’t asked our presenters for titles in advance so I am looking forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts and perspectives on OER and sustainability. I think it’s fair to say that this line up should make for some lively discussions! Particularly as Suzanne has promised to deliver her presentation through the medium of interpretative dance, while David Kernohan will be favouring light operetta. At least that’s what they said on twitter, so it must be true, right? Oh, and Pat has threatened to do another video…. And all I have to do is chair the session and make sure no one talks for more than ten minutes. Easy? Wish me luck :}

Look forward to seeing you at #cetis13!