TALL blog

I am delighted to report that we have received funding from the Higher Education Academy/JISC Open Educational Resources Programme Phase 3 strand for the Sesame project.

Sesame aims to  produce a rich and sustainable source of open educational resources (OER), aimed at adult learners and their tutors, but of use to all, across a broad range of subject disciplines.  The resources will be made freely available for others to view, download, re-purpose, and incorporate in to their own learning and teaching.

The specific aims of the project are to:

• Embed open ways of working in the development and delivery of the Department’s Weekly Class Programme.
• Increase awareness and knowledge of OER among staff and students.
• Enable weekly class students to find and use appropriate, validated OER in their work.
• Improve part-time tutors’ skills and confidence in identifying, using and creating OER.
• Widen access to Oxford’s teaching to new audiences globally.

To achieve these aims the project will:

• Create and release new open content.
• Develop tools and processes that facilitate open practices.
• Provide training to support part-time tutors to identify, use and create OER.
• Develop infrastructure to enhance discovery of OER generated by the Weekly Class Programme.
• Share lessons learned from the project with JISC and the wider community.

The project began in October 2011 and will end in October 2012.

For TALL this project is an exciting move from our work consuming OERs through projects such as Mosaic and our broader online course development work, and researching how others do this in the OER Impact reports.  It will also give us a chance to contribute to the wider work  producing OER at Oxford that the OpenSpires project has started so strongly.  I am hopeful our experience as end-users will help us produce more usable and useful OER and that is certainly something we will be investigating as the project moves forward.

Image: Genie in an oil lamp. / shannonzhang / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0