Open Educational Resources (OERs) are increasingly being made available by Further Education (FE) and Higher Education (HE) institutions. They are resources licensed in a way such that they can be re-used, re-purposed, re-mixed and re-distributed. There are a number of license options for individuals or organisations considering releasing OERs, perhaps the most common being various iterations of the Creative Commons license. This infoKit, as with the whole of the JISC infoNet website, is itself released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.
There are a number of considerations to take into account when dealing with OERs. These range from specific technical issues to barriers and enablers to institutional adoption. This infoKit aims to both inform and explain OERs and the issues surrounding them for managers, academics and those in learning support. It is aimed at senior managers, learning technologists, technical staff and educators with an interest in releasing OERs to the educational community.
This infokit includes information about the three year UK Open Educational Resources Programme (UKOER) (2009 - 2012) and offers links to a wide range of resources which describe the outcomes (lessons learned) and outputs (reports, guidance materials and toolkits) that emerged.
Last Cookiweek David Kernohan, a JISC Programme Manager, commented in a Guardian article last week that Open Educational Resources are a radical idea that has now become mainstream. JISC infoNet's OER infoKit supports JISC's OER programmes in providing a reference point:
To try and condense some of the vast amount that has been learnt about the benefits of OER releases in the past 10 years, the Higher Education Academy and JISC have developed an InfoKit. This now includes materials specifically aimed at advocacy to senior institutional staff, talking about business models for openness and making arguments around institutional ethos, alongside sound evidence-based advice about every aspect of getting to a stage where releasing materials openly online is as natural as creating them. We also have an interactive tool – how open are you – which uses your responses to make a recommendation concerning how much openness your institution is ready for.
(David Kernohan)
As David mentions, one section that was missing up until now is a section giving an overview of Open Educational Resources for Senior Managers. We're delighted to announce that today this has been rectified with a dedicated area:
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