Aims of the Pilot Phase of the Programme

The joint JISC/Higher Education Academy Open Educational Resources Pilot programme (April 2009 - April 2010) was designed to support institutions, consortia and individuals to release open educational resources for use and repurposing worldwide, by assisting the development of appropriate processes and polices to make this process an integral part of the learning material creation workflow.

The pilot was intended to help us understand the most effective ways of supporting this aim, and was intended as the precursor to a longer programme to promote the embedding of these processes across institutions.  The range of materials to be released included course materials, reading lists, student generated content, images and other multimedia, learning objects, electronic learning activities, recordings and supporting materials from lectures, workshops and presentations.

There was an expectation that there would be benefits to the institutions, individuals and subject communities involved and the UK HE sector as a whole in terms of overseas recruitment and academic reputation as a result of the work started by this programme. Projects are currently preparing final reports and outputs which will inform this infokit, as synthesis of key messages and outcomes are drawn together. The Programme Synthesis and Evaluation Team developed a framework to support evaluation activities which identified key issues and questions that the programme aims to address. This is available on their Synthesis and Evaluation Wiki.

Pilot Programme: OER Release Outputs

Project strands

Institutional strand

Seven institutionally based projects were funded to openly realease their existing learning resources free for use and repurposing.  Projects were expected to release at least the equivalent of one undergraduare course (360 credits).

Individual strand

Eight individuals were funded to release high quality educational resources to support at least the equivalent of 30 credits.

Subject strand

Fourteen consortia were funded which were led by an Academy Subject Centre and including at least one professional body or national jusbject associateion and several institutional faculties, departments, or schools working in one or more of the relevant subject areas.

Resources to support the programme

A range of resources were made available to support the projects taking part in the pilot phase:

http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/Projects/OpenEducationalResources.aspx JISC legal resources, includes video podcast and short video presentation.

http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/UKOER_Support loads of CETIS stuff here, including several key blog posts... will unpack below.

http://www.caledonianacademy.net/spaces/oer/ Evaluation & synthesis pages - a good set of resource links to plunder, and the evaluation framework.

http://www.techdis.ac.uk/index.php?p=1 TechDis, general accessibility resources.

http://community.jorum.ac.uk/ Jorum community bay - advice on Jorum use and a Forum

http://labspace.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=5129 Temporary OU score pages, links to loads of OU resources

http://www.netvibes.com/hwilliamson#oer-institutional_projects Heather Williamson's amazing oer netvibes pages, aggregating blog posts and resources from projects. There's several tabs of OER goodness

The JISC funded REPRODUCE programme, completed just before the pilot programme began, offers valuable information around repurposing and reusing existing learning and teaching materials http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearningcapital/reproduce