Blogging for Bioscience

Last week we finally managed to meet up for the first time. Kevin Caley @ Nottingham (of the Biodiversity consortium project)  hosted us. Each project partner gave an outline of the range of materials they were going to release and the work necessary to get them into an OER position. We have a diverse range of materials which should allow us to explore all the different release, delivery and content maintenance issues. We then had a walkthrough the workpackage plan to check our understanding of the requirements was consistent.

The requirement for a JISC style Consortium Agreement as opposed to one of our regular project contracts appears to be causing some additional delays. All parties thought that the sign-off would be a similar process and timescale to our regular contracts via ‘Letters of Agreement’ but this extra overhead has caused more delay than expected (especially holiday time).  Fortunately no partner reported they had been prevented from progressing their work while this is being sorted out.

Within our workpackages I have set aside a little time for the Project Partner to be able to explore the OER concept/community to see where their discipline materials might work most effectively. We need to be able to gather viewpoints from the practitioners point of view as the project progresses so we can tackle issues before the final release and maximise the academic talents in the group . I am sure they will have concerns about the sustainability of OER - it needs effective reward and recognition for the individual and their HEI otherwise their financial audit will see OER production as ‘an opportunity for cost saving’; its an expensive pursuit unless you recover more than you contribute. This will require skilled practitioners to be capable of adopting other resources quickly into their own delivery framework; it appears many e-learning academics find it far easier to produce their own resources consistently than mix and match someone elses as it may take longer to discover, evaluate and select someone elses OER than it would to write your own. Does writing your own win because it develops a new skill every time?

The DJ analogy is that the art of the blend is just as important as the raw material - someone has to bring OER together at the point of delivery and this will probably be yet another burden on the academic talent pool unless it receives a little space to explore the problems. Our first meeting looked at the likely mixing deck for this - JorumOpen and the ReLoad editor, but other solutions may be possible.