Everything open

RLOs and OERs offer educators the opportunity to embed pre-created applicable learning content directly into the course material. Their use is becoming ever more widespread as universities benefit from the advantages of both creating learning objects and repurposing existing material; enriching the student experience and impacting positively on recruitment, retention and progression within the institution.

For Open Education week at 11am (GMT) on Thursday at Lou McGill, David Kernohan and Allison Littlejohn will present some of the key findings from the UKOER programme ‘What you can learn from the UKOER experience‘. The programme included over 80 projects aiming to release OER ,funded by two UK government agencies, Jisc (www.jisc.ac.uk) and the Higher Education Academy (HEA www.hea.ac.uk). The programme was based on the idea that widespread involvement of faculty and support staff within the programme would bring about a sustainable change in culture from focusing on content ownership, to focusing on open sharing; and that building a critical mass of OER would bring about sustainable change in practices of reuse and re-purposing. The lessons learned from evaluation and synthesis of the programme are available from http://bit.ly/oerevalsynth

One set of key findings was around the role of communities in the release of Open Educational Resources (OER).  How professional practice is transformed to support activities underpinning the release of OER, sometimes called open educational practice (OEP), is not well understood. Communities of practice provide a positive environment for changing professional practice.

Examples of communities are subject discipline communities or communities within an institution. Each community will have members with different roles (for example academics, support staff, learners), regulated by specific rules. These sorts of communities are important if the benefits of a culture of open resources, open knowledge, free sharing and peer collaboration in education are to be realised.

The UKOER programme provided a context to explore these tensions and highlight the benefits and limitations of communities in transforming professional practice.

Check also:

- http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching?tag=Community

- http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching?tag=OER

- https://gustmees.wordpress.com/2013/01/23/is-your-professional-development-up-to-date/