OER beyond the OU: making connections and spotting (research challenging) opportunities

Chris Pegler

Researcher 2.0 (Pegler) 2

What OER offers

Global opportunities IPR vanquished

Goodwill amongst researchers? Unlimited reuse potential

Researcher 2.0 (Pegler) 3

What is OER?

• Li Yuan (2008) CETIS whitepaper Open Educational Resources “Opportunities and Challenges for Higher Education” sets scene.

• “digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research” (OECD, 2007)

• Tuomi (2006) a higher level of openness is “about the right and ability to modify, repackage and add value to the resource”. However, most existing initiatives offer the most basic level of openness – ‘open’ means ‘without cost’ but it does not mean ‘without conditions’.

Researcher 2.0 (Pegler) 4

OER projects ‘out there’

• Teaching or research, link or resource, all sizes. MIT

OpenCourseWareUtah State University OCW

Rice University’s Connexions

Open.Michigan OpenLearn JorumOpen

Introduction to Open Education

Connectivism and Connective Knowledge

Japan Open CourseWare

Consortium (JOCW)

Wikiversity Curriki GLOBE

Irish Open Multimedia Training Videos

ParisTech Open Course Ware

Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative

China Open Resources for Education (CORE)

Stanford University on YouTube

Researcher 2.0 (Pegler) 5

HEFCE/HEA/JISC call

• Programme, institutional, individual strands. £5.7m pilot (’09), £10m p.a. possible 2010 on.

• Chris’s OU bid is for £20k in individual strand• The social glue that supports sharing (H806) content• How OER objects can be reused/ reusable (i.e. simple

learning design)• Uses Web 2.0 tools (incl. cloudworks) to share and

inform around a 30pt ‘course’ in OpenLearn.• Potential to inform TESSA teachers (XO laptops) and

Alex’s requirements and OER MA course. • Its about ‘Can we show and share how?’

Researcher 2.0 (Pegler) 6

Chris’s NTFS bid

• Funds 11 x £250k NTF-led projects in ’09

• Bidding with BCU and Bradford (nice mix)

• Stage 1: Writing RLOs around use of OER

• Stage 2: Use on HEAP courses. Evaluate.

• Stage 3: Students evaluate HEAP output.

• Addresses questions of sustainability, quality and contextualisation.

• Uses OpenLearn to disseminate.

• Through to 2nd stage so 46% chance.

Researcher 2.0 (Pegler) 7

Some of my questions …

• How to know whether content is suitable to reuse? What metadata counts?

• Social interaction = sustainable sharing?

• Could student/user evaluation of (OER) RLOs create meaningful auto metadata?

• How do we contextualise in reuse (e.g. are there institutional or discipline traits)?

• What’s the value of RLOs as reusable LD?

Researcher 2.0 (Pegler) 8

Hope that went okay?

Email c.a.pegler@open.ac.uk to arrange a date to be bored silly about reuse, RLOs, repositories, OER and other stuff connected with her PhD.