Woruldhord, Ancestral voices, the Great War and more.
One of the main conclusions from our Mosaic project (which developed an online course, ‘Ancestral voices: the earliest English literature’, primarily from pre-existing content and made it freely available for reuse and adaption) was that the best way to get your OERs used is to make them as discoverable as possible, by putting them or linking to them from as many places as possible, and especially those places where your target audience are likely to look. To this end, while we submitted the outputs of that project to JORUM as required by JISC, we also made them freely available through our Open Moodle site, and have been pursuing other opportunities to share and use these materials ever since.
Building on this we are now really pleased to be able to contribute the course to a new project here at Oxford, the JISC funded Woruldhord project which “sets out to collect together into an online hoard, digital objects related to the teaching, study, or research of Old English and the Anglo-Saxon period of history”.
This project builds on the work of OUCS in community collections from the The Great War Archive and in OERs with OpenSpires. As we already use outputs from both of these in our courses, it is really good to be able to contribute content back in the opposite direction.
As I type this I realise that it is all sounding terribly inwards facing, but while all the examples here are from Oxford sources, this is in fact indicative of the wider growth of truly excellent academic (and non academic) resources on the web and the extent to which our course authors are using them in their materials. While we are still a long way from the vision of pervasive reuse that I suspect many had a few years ago, at least in our online courses authors are as likely to direct students to an image from flikr, a project database, an online text book, a digitised primary source, a Google maps mash-up or even a learning object, as an article in a journal or a textbook. The process is slow, but reuse is growing and the more projects like these that take place the more compelling the reasons for reusing digital content is becoming.