The presentation slides for the Open Educational Resources (OER) talk at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) given on July 9, 2012. It explores how we can find, reuse, remix, create and share OER. It also provides a lot of excellent resources and tips. (Summary by author/presenter)

This reflection examines some of the continuing and emerging issues in the open educational resources (OER) field. These include blending OER with university management structures; formal and non-formal OER; the need for sustainable OER business models; and expanding awareness, adoption, and use of OER. In the future, research will need to examine the concept of open educational practices (OEP) and OER issues relevant to faculty incentives and career advancement in the university. The author suggests there is no silver bullet solution to the “open” road ahead. Proprietary and open content will coexist in the education sector. OER are not a panacea for resolving all the range of global education issues and divides. OER are, however, a valuable resource that must be developed and sustained. OER may ultimately be the genuine equalizer for education and for empowering social inclusion in a pluralistic, multicultural, and imperfect world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

uccess in open educational resources (OER) has been reported by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA and the Open University in the UK, among others. It is unclear, however, how valuable OER are in learning and teaching. Approaches to OER policy and sustainability are just two other key aspects that remain unresolved across the sector. Based on the findings from the Open, Transferable, Technology-enabled Educational Resources (OTTER) project at the University of Leicester, UK,1 we introduce the OER mix framework: purpose, processes, product, and policy. We argue that different mixes of the four Ps can generate different approaches to OER. We discuss the relevance of the framework and its importance for social inclusion and widening access to higher education. We also discuss the implications of the OER mix for the openness agenda. Institutions may find value in adapting and applying the framework. We invite colleagues to critique it and report back. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In adult learning education contexts, the Internet Information Literacy (IIL) process comprises not only of fundraising for its immediate use, but in particular conditions it also requires to “shed light” on a problematic condition using open educational resources (OER) that incorporate analogical thinking into professional problem solving. This paper presents a model to apply analogy in problem solving (PS). Based on studies, on experimental evidence found in specific literature, and on empirical data obtained from a case study, the model focuses on the awareness level that professional adults engaged in learning activities have in applying this thinking process. Their use of the web and of OER serves multiple purposes: for self-guided training, to plan educational activities, to solve problems or to express their creativity. Field experience conducted during three annual editions of teaching IIL in the specialisation course Social software and Web 2.0 for didactics and education highlighted the importance of setting up online, problem oriented activities which focus on analogical thinking and a creative use of OER. (Abstract by author)

In this paper we present an alternative view of Open Educational Resources (OERs). Rather than focusing on open media resources produced by expert practitioners for use by peers and learners, we examine the practice of learners as active agents, producing open media resources using the devices in their pockets: their mobile phones. In this study, students are the producers and operate simultaneously as legitimate members of the YouTube community and producers of educational content for future cohorts. Taking an Action Research approach we investigated how student’s engagement with open media resources related to their creativity. Using Kleiman’s framework of fives conceptual themes which emerged from academics experiences of creativity (constraint, process, product, transformation, fulfilment), we found that these themes revealed the opportunities designed into the assessed task and provided a useful lens with which to view students’ authentic creative experiences.

Students’ experience of creativity mapped on to Kleiman’s framework, and was affected by assessment. Dimensions of openness changed across platforms, although the impact of authenticity and publication on creativity was evident, and the production of open media resources that have a dual function as OERs has clear benefits in terms of knowledge sharing and community participation.The transformational impacts for students were evident in the short term but would merit a longitudinal study. A series of conclusions are drawn to inform future practice and research.

“The most important thing in our rapidly changing society is not to amass some certain knowledge forever, but to be able to throw out obsolete knowledge, to be ready to start over, to see the world with fresh eyes” (Kupferberg, 2003) (Abstract by authors)

This article aims to share experience from a Swedish project on the introduction and implementation of Open Educational Resources (OER) in higher education with both national and international perspectives. The project, OER – resources for learning, was part of the National Library of Sweden Open Access initiative and aimed at exploring, raising awareness of and disseminating the use of OER and the resulting pedagogical advantages for teaching and learning. Central to the project’s activities were a series of regional seminars which all featured a combination of multi-site meetings combined with online participation. This combination proved highly successful and extended the reach of the project. In total the project reached around 1000 participants at its events and many more have seen the recorded sessions.

Several unresolved issues beyond the scope of the project became explicit but which are absolutely crucial challenges. Firstly, the evolution from OER towards open educational practices (OEP) and open educational cultures (OEC). OEP and OEC imply the establishment of national and international policies and strategies where the use of OER is officially encouraged, sanctioned and developed. Secondly it became explicit that the issue of metadata is crucial for finding OER and facilitating their use and reuse for teachers and learners. Thirdly, the sustainability of OER must be stimulated by ensuring the creation of material that can easily be adapted and reused by teachers in other countries and contexts. (Abstract by authors)

OUM OER (Open Educational Resources) is an initiative by the Institute of Quality, Research and Innovation (IQRI), based on an idea mooted by the President of Open University Malaysia. Managed by the Institute of Teaching and Learning Advancement (ITLA), the objective of the initiative is to share some of OUM’s learning resources with the general public. More resources will be made available over time.

It is believed that by sharing our resources, you will be introduced to the variety of materials made available to our distance learners. Through the variety, we expect, the various learning styles will be supported.

ISKME created OER Commons, publicly launched in February 2007, to provide support for and build a knowledge base around the use and reuse of open educational resources (OER). As a network for teaching and learning materials, the web site offers engagement with resources in the form of social bookmarking, tagging, rating, and reviewing. OER Commons has forged alliances with over 120 major content partners to provide a single point of access through which educators and learners can search across collections to access over 30,000 items, find and provide descriptive information about each resource, and retrieve the ones they need. By being "open," these resources are publicly available for all to use, and principally through Creative Commons licensing, many thousands are legally available for repurposing, modifying and improving.

Open and distance learning (ODL) is mostly characterised by the up front development of self study educational resources that have to be paid for over time through use with larger student cohorts (typically in the hundreds per annum) than for conventional face to face classes. This different level of up front investment in educational resources, and increasing pressures to utilise more expensive formats such as rich media, means that collaborative development is necessary to firstly make use of diverse professional skills and secondly to defray these costs across institutions. The Open University (OU) has over 40 years of experience of using multi professional course teams to develop courses; of working with a wide range of other institutions to develop educational resources; and of licensing use of its educational resources to other HEIs. Many of these arrangements require formal contracts to work properly and clearly identify IPR and partner responsibilities. With the emergence of open educational resources (OER) through the use of open licences, the OU and other institutions has now been able to experiment with new ways of collaborating on the development of educational resources that are not so dependent on tight legal contracts because each partner is effectively granting rights to the others to use the educational resources they supply through the open licensing (Lane, 2011; Van Dorp and Lane, 2011). This set of case studies examines the many different collaborative models used for developing and using educational resources and explain how open licensing is making it easier to share the effort involved in developing educational resources between institutions as well as how it may enable new institutions to be able to start up open and distance learning programmes more easily and at less initial cost. Thus it looks at three initiatives involving people from the OU (namely TESSA, LECH-e, openED2.0) and contrasts these with the Peer-2-Peer University and the OER University as exemplars of how OER may change some of the fundamental features of open and distance learning in a Web 2.0 world. It concludes that while there may be multiple reasons and models for collaborating on the development of educational resources the very openness provided by the open licensing aligns both with general academic values and practice but also with well established principles of open innovation in businesses. (Abstract by author)

his investigation focuses on the use of social media tools and personal network environments for engaging learning communities in producing, adapting, sharing and disseminating OER collaboratively. The aim of this investigation is to identify new forms of collaboration, as well as strategies that can be used to make the production and adaptation processes of OER more explicit for anyone in the community to contribute. (Abstract by authors)