Tomorrow I will attend the official start-up meeting for the UK OER projects down in London. I expect this to be very useful to discover more about how the process is going so far, the support available for the pilot projects under the current OER initiative, and some of specifics of the legal constraints that our partners may need to be more mindful of. The reason I say that is that my information returned so far generally condenses to “as far as we know, it’s not really a problem”. Now this might be indeed be the case but one of the aims of the project is to clarify where that approach really ends up under the OER initiative – the open sharing of teaching materials is really the exchange of core business material and must be carefully considered and legally documented. I have not seen any published copyright permission statements (for learning materials) which acknowledge the existence of off-campus repositories explicitly.
My perception (so far) is that, for the academic community in general, OER appears to be seen as an eventual emergent property from various bits of courseware becoming visible. This is missing the point – OER needs to be stimulated by some excellent examples of production with the OER purpose in mind. Admittedly, to get a critical mass of content we have to convert some existing resources to work with and future OER projects will have to set aside resource to enable experienced and novice OER producers to build content and share the materials. However, we have a gap in that the Learning Technologists who work on behalf of content producers and not likely to be in a position to ask their employers to adopt an OER approach to any given project – when time and resources are short. They need some suitable projects to ‘cut their teeth’ on which employ the adoption of OER materials – those who know how to find and deploy re-used content in their projects effectively will promote themselves. We need some OER resource to go to the non-discipline LTs for them to show what they can do with it, probably through a commissioning process for some courseware on a particular topic identified as in high demand in a key discipline. If our tagging strategy was stronger then we could encourage the independents (a.k.a. “Mavericks”) to share non-commissioned experiences effectively.
Meeting will be tracked as #oerstartup so that’s http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23oerstartup for the rest of us.
[...] 9, 2009 · No Comments “Terrymc” on Blogging for Bioscience notes that there is a meeting regarding OER startups in the UK. No details about the meeting are [...]