This week’s round-up: Getting closer acquainted with OER December 17, 2009
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , trackbackWe had our monthly Development and Implementation wider meeting this morning, where we looked at Open Educational Resources. One of the areas we want to investigate with the project is giving an opportunity for making content open. As part of the project we are looking at how we can enable staff within the University to share content using a creative commons license. This has meant a review of existing learning and teaching policies, to see what changes would be required to implement this.
For our meeting today attendees were presented with an overview of JISC OER programme, I found the slides presented at last year’s JISC conference extremely helpful. I also gave an introduction to OER commons web site which is a repository aggregator and JORUM. Here are the resources I used:
- Overview of Open Educational Resources: JISC OER Programme http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/events/2009/03/openeducationalresources-fintrypm.pdf http://www.jisc.ac.uk/oer;
- OER Commons Web Site http://www.oercommons.org/;
- JORUM http://www.jorum.ac.uk/;
In preparation for this I asked attendees to look at the OER Commons web site and also asked them to complete a poll so I could get some insight into their knowledge of open educational resources and how they found out about them – if you would like to see the Survey go to:
http://surveys.polldaddy.com/s/738640D664446DFB/
From the responses I have received so far:
Repositories that individuals had heard of:
- Most had heard of JORUM; MIT Open Courseware; OER Commons, not many had heard of Oxford University Mathematics Open Course Ware and Gresham College London’s open courseware.
With regards downloading or linking to materials
- Not many had downloaded material or linked to material – but regarding this activity the Higher Education Subject Centre and Intute were the most popular sites for doing this (interesting that Higher Education Subject Centres, came lower down the list of the most heard of repositories)
Contribution ot repositories
- Only one response here for the HEA subject centres
Recommended sites
- There was quite a low percentage for all sites with regards whether individuals would recommend them – it would be interesting to find out why
Regarding the question how individuals found out about new resources most cited source was colleagues with RSS coming last, as a result there was a call to have a future meeting on RSS feeds. Other sources were serendipity, searching the Internet, JISC workshops and the Times Higher.
With respect to the final question asking colleagues to recommend a web site that provides free to use content, the following answers were given:
- google books
- amazon
- project Gutenburg
- Intute
- BUBL
- Google Scholar
- Flickr
- Learn Higher
- INTUTE
- OU or MIT
- ICT Tutors
- HEA subject centres
- Open Learn
Even though this was quite a short survey – the responses will definitely help to inform our activities in the New Year. One attendee has already requested that I run a session for their service on OER. And I am going to put links and details of OER resources together with an overview in our online course “Learning Object Repositories and Sharing Content”, which all members of the Development and Implementation Group have been enrolled on.
Comments»
Hi Vicki,
This is really useful! I will be looking at all of the web sites over the coming weeks and hoping to link to some of them on my NOW Learning Space.
I think the session planned for the new year on RSS feeds will be really useful.
Thank you for this – I am finding it all very enlightening!
Best wishes,
Sarah