OER Workshop
Monday, March 28th, 2011Last week we ran our first workshop exploring OER use with 9 academics across a variety of institutions. They were chosen to be practitioners with little previous exposure to OER – reflecting the starting position for the majority of HE. This was a very hands on session where we asked participants to look for OER with a particular teaching session in mind (although without precluding the discovery of things they might want to use elsewhere), hoping to understand processes at least somewhat close to actual practice.
It is obviously too soon to draw any firm conclusions at this point, but a few themes that emerged were:
- Everyone reuses all the time, but not necessarily OER.
- All aware of issues around copyright – but not always how best to manage them.
- There is simultaneous more and less out there than you might expect – VERY dependant on what you are looking for.
- Similarly contradictory evidence around where best to search, for somethings Google is best, others found specialist sources a revelation “why didn’t I know about JORUM before?”
- The form of OER is vital to how it is reused, wholesale reuse most likely with video and multimedia you cannot make yourself, textual resources are often used more for inspiration than anything else.