The three year JISC/HE Academy UKOER Programme investigated OER release and use in a range of educational contexts and subject disciplines. It considered technical, pedagogical, cultural, economic and legal aspects across a number of sectors, including public, private and 3rd sector organisations. The lessons learned and resulting practical resources have been incorporated into this infoKit.
A wide range of issues affect the ways that individuals release learning resources openly for others to use, reuse and re-purpose. They may do this as an individual through the web or on behalf of an institution. They may have an institutional mandate to release their educational content, a central team to support technical, legal or quality aspects of release, and they may have guidance and procedures to adhere to. They may share materials through a subject community resource where knowledge and practice are also shared. Motivations for both release and use are often strongly linked to the perceived benefits for themselves or other stakeholder groups. (see Why OER)
There are many misconceptions around the sharing of learning resources and around OERs. (see OER Myths)
Some useful questions to consider include:
- Why would I want to release my learning materials as OERs?
- What are the benefits of release and use to different stakeholders?
- What are the costs and how do these balance against the benefits?
- Which model/s approaches are most appropriate?
- How can this be sustained?
Discoverability and accessibility of OER depends on appropriate technical approaches, hosting choices and decisions around ownership and licencing. This is discussed on the Technical and Data Management considerations and Legal Aspects of OER. Decisions made around licencing, granularity of resources, and how much pedagogical guidance is incorporated, can relate to the intended audiences of OER. Engaging the intended audience during the design and release processes has an impact on overall engagement and use, but this may impact on access for wider audiences and relevance of OER for other groups. Not all OER are widely or globally accessible in a pedagogical or technical sense.
The UKOER Programme aimed to support open release of existing materials but evidence shows that it can be more challenging, and costly (in terms of time and resource commitment) to release existing learning materials than create materials from scratch. The programme identified a number of barriers to both OER release and use, and projects developed imaginative approaches to support development, management, release, discoverability, accessibility, and re-use of OER, often through complex partnerships with stakeholders outside the education sector. OER release is sustainable across a number of contexts and settings.
A major barrier to sharing learning materials in the past has been availability of discoverable resources with appropriate provenance and licensing to support re-use and re-purposing. The number of OER released over the three year period has meant that the UK now has a significant corpus of material to encourage use, re-use and re-purposing - and the raised profile of Jorum, the national open repository for learning materials, further supports access to OER across a range of subject areas.
The programme has offered some excellent models of good practice for raising awareness and engaging people with the benefits of open sharing. It has provided valuable guidance materials applicable to the wider community and presents opportunities for other institutions, individuals and communities to take advantage of the lessons learned and the outputs produced.
Programme activities took place at a time when OER had a high profile globally and managed to benefit from and contribute towards some interesting conversations. The emergence of the notion of Open Educational Practice (OEP) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) brought additional complexity to an already challenging area of work and highlighted a need to consider how OER fits within both the wider open content ecosystem and open approaches to learning and teaching.
UKOER brought together a range of people and agencies which had been working since the early 2000s to support increased sharing of learning materials. This community consolidated around the concept of open sharing and has grown as project and programme teams developed new expertise, bringing energy and passion to ongoing conversations even though the programme has officially ended. This has to be seen as a very important outcome of the programme which will support the dissemination and integration of lessons learned across the educational sector.
The ongoing HEFCE Review of OER funded initiatives has found that the UKOER Programme has made a significant contribution to the journeys that funded UK educational institutions and individuals are taking along the path of open educational practice and open content. OER and open educational practice can have a positive impact on institutional strategy and policy, curriculum design and development and encourages cross-institutional collaboration. What they have learned gives them, and potentially the wider sector, a firm foundation to continue along the journey, wherever they started from.
It is difficult to summarise the rich outcomes of the three year programme. The UKOER Synthesis and Evaluation Team produced a report at the end of each year which includes summaries of lessons learned.
- McGill, L., Beetham, H., Falconer, I. and Littlejohn, A. JISC/HE Academy OER Programme: Pilot Phase Synthesis and Evaluation Report. JISC, 2010
- McGill, L., Falconer, I., Beetham, H. and Littlejohn, A. JISC/HE Academy OER Programme: Phase 2 Synthesis and Evaluation Report. JISC, 2011
- McGill, L., Falconer, I., Littlejohn, A. and Beetham, H. JISC/HE Academy OER Programme: Phase 3 Synthesis and Evaluation Report. JISC, 2011
JISC CETIS produced a reflective report on technical aspects a timeline and some visualisations from a range of data.
Written January 2013.
Dandelion Image CC BY joka2000(out)
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