I have set up this separate blog for the OER project work. I want to know how jiscinvolve blogs work compared to my existing elgg blog, and it gives me personal experience in Wordpress.

The Open Educational Resources (OER) subject strand has offered the Centre for Bioscience an opportunity to assemble a ‘Interactive Laboratory and Fieldwork Manual for the Biosciences’. We have identified 10 projects which can be collected for this and each of them have different strengths: The goal of the OER pilot being to identify and resolve many of the barriers leading to the production of OER and “change the culture”. It’s not necessarily a culture problem but we will certainly do our best to leave no stone unturned.

The way I intend to go about this, as project manager, is to take advantage of appropriate IT tools for managing and monitoring the project. I have always wanted to apply the Prince2 methodology (suitably tuned) to a rich and varied project and they don’t come much more varied than this. Within my own institution a similar approach is used to ensure significant projects are aligned with the institutional strategy and it appears to be doing this quite well. I will use the Infonet incarnation for two reasons; 1. It’s JISC and built for this (education environment) purpose so I want to give it a damn good shake and see how it performs; and 2. I want to demonstrate it within a subject centre network and report at the end how it can be used across SC projects. I studied methodologies a long while ago in my MSc.

The components will be managed through a nest of Sharepoints. A top OER Sharepoint to hold common documents and individual (10) sub-sites to manage each individual contribution. It’s fairly transparent with MS-Office so common docs can be exchanged and the advantage is that these can be gathered from a single point but privacy between projects can also be offered.

Finally, I want to apply Infopath to the forms created during the management of the projects. This should allow me to ’slice and dice’ the information in many directions to reveal common issues, risks and solutions for the reporting phase.

So far, all the technology is behaving.