OER beyond the OU, making connections and spotting (research challenging) opportunities

Research challenges of OERs

What OER offers 

1. Global opportunities

2. IPR vanquished

3. Goodwill amongst reseachers? 

4. Unlimited reuse potential

Li Yuan 2008 Cetis whitepage OER opportuniites and challenges for HE sets the scene.

OER projects: MIT. utah stage, rice uni connections, intro to open education, connectivism ad conective knowlege, globe, japan Open course ware, wikiversity, curriki, irish open, carnegie mellon, stanford uni

HEFCE/JISC call on OERs

£5.7 m pilot 09, £10m possible from 2010 onwards, three areas

1. Programme strands - discipline sharing

2. Institutional strand

3. Individual strand

Chris has submitted one on the H806 course and around sharing and the social glue that supports this, how OER objects can be reused/reusable (ie simple learning design)

Uses web 2.0 tools (including cloudworks) to share and inform around a 30pt course in Openlearn

Notion of social objects to share and discuss

Potential to inform TESSA teachers (XO laptops) and how you blend learning in developing world contexts and the idea about developing an OER MA course

It is about 'can we show and share how?'

Research questions

1. How to know whether content is suitable to resue - waht metadata counts?

2. Social interaction = sustainable sharing?

3. Could student/user evaluaton of (OER) RLOs create meaningful auto metadata?

4. How do we contextualise in reuse (eg are there institutional or discipline traits)?

5. What's the value of RLOs as reusable LD?