OER Sesame

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Genie in an oil lamp

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

This entry was posted in JISC, OER, oersesame, Open Educational Resources by Marion Manton. Bookmark the permalink.

About Marion Manton

I amSenior Manager: Learning Design and co-manager of TALL with David White. Previous to that I was eLearning Research Project Manager. As well as the day to day running of TALL I am responsible for the ensuring that all TALL programmes are best practice examples of learning online for their audience. I work closely with course teams to specify the learning they want to achieve with their programme and to identify the best uses of technology to do this. I also maintain currency with the latest research in eLearning, to ensure that TALL is aware of and exploits the best current knowledge of what works in terms of effective eLearning. My particular interests are in effective pedagogical models for different learning scenarios and how best to facilitate these by the appropriate use of technology. As well as the development of effective tools and processes to help academics identify these and translate knowledge of their subject and teaching into high quality online learning.