UK’s Perspective on OER: Developing a Professionally Organised Content Infrastructure Towards Innovation in Higher Education

THE SESSION HAS BEEN CANCELLED

Session Title: UK’s Perspective on OER: Developing a Professionally Organised Content Infrastructure Towards Innovation in Higher Education

Presenters: Sheila MacNeill, Assistant Director, Joint Information System Committee Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards (JCIS CETIS)
Li Yuan, Researcher, Joint Information System Committee Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards (JCIS CETIS)

Time & Date: 11:15 A.M. - 12:00 P.M., Thursday, August 13, 2009

Location: Rm. C100

Session Description: “The UK must have a core of open access learning resources organised in a coherent way to support on-line and blended learning by all higher education institutions and to make it more widely available in non-HE environments” (Cooke, 2008)

In line with this vision, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), the Higher Education Academy and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has launched the Open Educational Resources Pilot Programme which will run between April 2009 and April 2010. The goal of the programme is to make a significant number of high-quality education resources from UK higher education institutions freely available to both educators and learners worldwide. The pilot programme involves three separate project strands: Institutional, Subject Area and Individual in order to inform a larger programme and bring OER into the mainstream of the UK HE Sector. It is expected that this professionally organised infrastructure of academic and scholarly resources in the UK will provide new opportunities for innovation in Higher Education.

Wiley (2007) suggests that creation of a wide range of free to use learning resources will catalyse and support the types of experiments and innovations taking place in education today. He argues that “a sufficient amount of content, on a sufficient number of topics, at a sufficient level of quality, available at sufficiently low cost” is prerequisite to making radical improvements in education. In the case of Open Education, current OER projects and innovations will create a critical infrastructure of educational content to support institutional innovation in teaching and learning practice (personalised, inquiry-based and community-oriented education), accreditation services (competency-based and credit on?demand) and support services (tutors support and learning communities).
This paper will provide an initial review and analyse the UK OER programme and its funded projects and will examine the relevant institutional strategies and their potential impact on teaching and learning in Higher Education and Open Education in particular. We hope to address the following aspects in relation to developing institutional OER initiatives: First, the sustainability of long-term open resources released via the adoption of appropriate business models to serve a university’s core mission. Second, institutional policies and processes in making the release of open resources an integrated part of the educational resources creation cycle. Third, organisational and cultural issues on sharing and reusing teaching and learning resources within and between institutions and among educators; Fourth, technical considerations in the provision of flexible, extendable platforms and easily adaptable open tools to access, use, reuse, create and share content in institutional and national OER repositories and beyond. Finally, we will discuss the implications of this content infrastructure for new practices of learning and teaching and new methods of assessment and accreditation in institutions which are needed in order to maximise the potential of OERs and explore innovation in Open Education.