The document discusses Open Educational Resources (OER) and their potential to enhance educational opportunities by providing freely available digital materials for various educational purposes. It highlights key examples of OER initiatives and raises questions about the reuse of content, sustainability, and evaluation in the context of OER. Additionally, it mentions funding bids for projects aimed at improving the implementation and evaluation of OER in higher education.

1. OER beyond the OU: making connections and spotting (research challenging) opportunities Chris Pegler

2. What OER offers Global opportunities IPR vanquished Goodwill amongst researchers? Unlimited reuse potential

3. What is OER? Li Yuan (2008) CETIS whitepaper Open Educational Resources “Opportunities and Challenges for Higher Education” sets scene. “ digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research” (OECD, 2007) Tuomi (2006) a higher level of openness is “about the right and ability to modify, repackage and add value to the resource”. However, most existing initiatives offer the most basic level of openness – ‘open’ means ‘without cost’ but it does not mean ‘without conditions’.

4. OER projects ‘out there’ Teaching or research, link or resource, all sizes. Stanford University on YouTube China Open Resources for Education (CORE) Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative ParisTech Open Course Ware Multimedia Training Videos Irish Open GLOBE Curriki Wikiversity Rice University’s Connexions Utah State University OCW MIT OpenCourseWare Japan Open CourseWare Consortium (JOCW) Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Introduction to Open Education JorumOpen OpenLearn Open.Michigan

5. HEFCE/HEA/JISC call Programme, institutional, individual strands. £5.7m pilot (’09), £10m p.a. possible 2010 on. Chris’s OU bid is for £20k in individual strand The social glue that supports sharing (H806) content How OER objects can be reused/ reusable (i.e. simple learning design) Uses Web 2.0 tools (incl. cloudworks) to share and inform around a 30pt ‘course’ in OpenLearn. Potential to inform TESSA teachers (XO laptops) and Alex’s requirements and OER MA course. Its about ‘Can we show and share how?’

6. Chris’s NTFS bid Funds 11 x £250k NTF-led projects in ’09 Bidding with BCU and Bradford (nice mix) Stage 1: Writing RLOs around use of OER Stage 2: Use on HEAP courses. Evaluate. Stage 3: Students evaluate HEAP output. Addresses questions of sustainability, quality and contextualisation. Uses OpenLearn to disseminate. Through to 2 nd stage so 46% chance.

7. Some of my questions … How to know whether content is suitable to reuse? What metadata counts? Social interaction = sustainable sharing? Could student/user evaluation of (OER) RLOs create meaningful auto metadata? How do we contextualise in reuse (e.g. are there institutional or discipline traits)? What’s the value of RLOs as reusable LD?

8. Hope that went okay? Email [email_address] to arrange a date to be bored silly about reuse, RLOs, repositories, OER and other stuff connected with her PhD.