Open, transferable. Overview The Open, Transferable and Technology-enabled Educational Resources (OTTER) project at the University of Leicester will enable, pilot and evaluate systems and processes designed to enable individuals, teams and departments to release high quality open educational resources (OERs) for free access, reuse and repurposing by others, in perpetuity. OTTER will contribute a body of high quality OERs from 8 departments at Leicester, and plan to encourage and support many others. Equivalent to 360 credits, these OERs will be free to access online, use, adapt and repurpose under an appropriate open licence, and will be valuable to academics, past, current and future learners, funding agencies and professional organisations in the relevant fields worldwide.
OTTER will make extensive use of learning technologies and maximise the affordances of the JorumOpen platform and Leicester’s institutional open source platform, Plone. Aims and objectives Project methodology Technology / Standards used. Building exchanges for research. Overview To enhance and expand Nottingham’s existing Open Educational Repository, u-Now, one of the first OERs in the UK and a member of the international Open Courseware Consortium. Through providing guidance and advice, BERLiN will benefit the whole of the UK sector by disseminating our experiences, as well as the outcomes of the project itself which is aimed at exploring the issues raised in the wider take-up and development of an OER.
The University of Nottingham is keen to do this because it is part of its culture of sharing and because it is seen as a catalyst for change in the practice of academics from all parts of the University. Aims and objectives The aim of the project is to progress the vision of sustainable OERs by making a significant amount of existing learning resources freely available online. Project methodology BERLiN project team will undertake: Anticipated outputs and outcomes Technology/Standards used Project Staff Project Manager Project Team. Open Exeter. Overview A research-intensive University, Exeter is revising its Education Strategy, placing greater emphasis on promoting active learning and in which students and staff can ‘range’ across disciplinary boundaries.
This will be supported by the use of appropriate new technologies and contextually located within a rich array of learning materials. In addition, we are increasing our international intake and the availability of OER will be key to marketing Exeter’s education ‘brand’. This enhanced educational focus will impact upon the character of the developmental support that staff will require in order to promote appropriate student engagement. Aims and objectives Exeter is committed to encouraging open educational practice and believes that Open Exeter will inform and support widespread transformations in learning and teaching.
Project methodology Anticipated outputs and outcomes Technology / Standards used Project Staff. Unicycle. Overview Leeds Metropolitan University (Leeds Met) has recently developed an institutional repository. This is currently being used to share content on a small scale. Also at this time Leeds Met would like to explore the sharing of materials across institutions in order to be more effective and efficient in the creation of learning materials. Currently staff share materials at a very local (subject/award) level. The OER call provides an opportunity for Leeds Met to identify materials of value to other institutions and partners and release some of our well-established materials currently located on our skills for learning site (skillsforlearning.leedsmet.ac.uk) under an open license. Further to this our expanding Regional University Network (RUN) would benefit from access to our materials as they deliver HE courses in an FE setting.
Aims and Objectives Aim: To build a ‘unicycle’: a prototype mechanism for the export and import of open educational resources at Leeds Metropolitan University. OpenStaffs. Open content at Oxford University. Overview Open Spires has two purposes: Firstly, to increase the amount of educational audio and video content released from Oxford University as Open Content Resources (OER). Secondly, to enable the University to investigate and disseminate the institutional implications of making some of this material available as 'Open Content'.
The project is making a range of audio and video podcasting material available (talks, research seminars etc) through the web and other channels. The material will be open for reuse and redistribution by third parties globally, provided that it is used in a non-commercial way and is attributed to its creator. Aims & Objectives Staff support materials will be integrated into the Oxford staff development programme and shared amongst UK learning technology and staff development units. This work enables ‘lay’ academic staff to engage and be confident in understanding the use of open licences and reuse of OER materials. Project methodology Technology/Standards Used. Open content employability project. Overview OCEP will deliver a minimum of 360 CATS points of undergraduate open education resources. Coventry University is a business-facing institution and OCEP will deliver content in the general area of employability, which fits squarely with the university’s mission and strategic plans. 'Employability' affects every area of the university’s activity and curriculum and content will be drawn from across all areas of the university.
OCEP will include diverse content types from Second Life machinima to the more usual handouts and PowerPoints. Aims & Objectives OCEP aims to: Project Methodology The project is divided into three main phases. The first phase is experimentation. The second phase is establishing the collection. The third phase is evangelising and embedding. Anticipated Outputs & Outcomes Outputs Technology/Standards Used Project Staff Project Director. Some real data on Web 2.0 use (SPIRE Project) on theTALL blog. As part of the JISC funded ‘SPIRE’ project we ran a survey to try to discover which online services people were using and in what manner.
We were interested to find out which services were popular and if they were being used for work, for study or socially / for fun. The SPIRE project was originally looking into the possibility of using peer-to-peer technologies in UK HE and FE for informal sharing but switched to a more Web 2.0 focus as it became clear that these types of services were already having an impact on the tertiary education sector.
They also appear to be where most of the informal sharing and collaboration is currently taking place online. The survey was advertised to the Department for Continuing Education’s online students and on the online courses marketing pages. We received circa 1400 responses which left us with a lot of data to analyse. I have processed this data in to a number of colorful charts which are in the PDF below.