1. Philanthropic approaches, community sharing and empowerment
It takes two - Delivering public health education to students in low/middle income countries: the effects of OCW/OER on teaching practices People's Open Access Education Initiative, UK - a project in partnership with Manchester Metropolitan University, where open source and open courseware has been used to develop a Masters in Public Health, for public health practitioners in remote and disadvantaged areas across the world. This is taught by volunteers and learning outcomes and assessment are based on learning using asynchronous discussions
An overview of the challenges of the Bridge To Success project that takes UK open content to targeted US students - a partnership between The Open University (OU) (UK), Anne Arundel Community College (AACC), the University of Maryland University College (UMUC), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (USA), focusing on learner capability, confidence and motivation through the acquisition of learning skills and core maths. . The Bridge to Success (B2S) content aims to allow remediation and practice, accelerate time to completion and open up pathways to skill as well as prepare for college placements. B2S is contributing to the American Graduation Initiative outlined by President Obama in 2009 which aims for all US citizens to obtain at least one year of post-secondary education or career training.
We'll always have PARiS…. (Promoting Academic Resources in Society) – extending OER into non-traditional areas - Nottingham Trent University & The Ear Foundation, partnership project has developed OERs to improve the education of parents, teachers and care givers specifically focusing on cochlear implants
Exploring OER rich media reuse through social media content communities -
Film and audiovisual media open archives as OER: Sarah Atkinson - The Sp-ark archive is an interactive online project based on the multi-media archive of filmmaker Sally Potter. Users are able to view and annotate materials using the sites ‘pathways’ feature, other users are then able to access the annotated pathways, which lead to a deeper engagement with the materials. This lends itself to the critical and analytical study of primary materials intrinsic to both undergraduate and postgraduate study within numerous disciplines. This provides an opportunity to create a user community around the resources. To examine its potential this case study uses groups to demonstrate, explore and evaluate the potential of the archive as a teaching, learning and assessment device. The groups also collaboratively generate, develop and share open educational resources around the content of the archive.
Found Footage and the ready-made: Chris Follows - Addressing the challenge of developing complex media rich content, through media content communities within practice based Art and Design subjects including SCORE research, ALTO UK (JISC UK OER programme), http://process.arts.ac.uk and the DIAL project (digital Integration into arts learning) part of the JISC UK Developing digital literacies programme.
How OERs can help a Strategically Important and Vulnerable Subject Area - Quantitative Social Science - Jackie Carter - Use of real data to develop students' statistics skills
E-Assessment, OERs and Learning: exploring a relationship of dependence and mutual benefit Hatzipanagos, S. This was a comparative study of using assessment in distance learning. It argued that assessment needs to be integrated into learning and teaching in distance learning courses and that assessment in the context of OER is the process of evaluating knowledge skills and competencies gained through OER. However, the presentation observed that OERs are quite transmissive and that there is an absence of formal and informal assessment practices either formative or summative. The challenge is how e-assessment components and tools can be embedded effectively in OER, there is a need to look at establishing disciplinary approaches in OERs and how they relate to the context of e-assessment. There is also sometimes the issue that integrated OERs are linked to proprietary resources. The research found that self assessment is prominent feature together with wrap around activities.
UNESCO Chair in OER established in 2010 at the Open University of the Netherlands (The Netherlands)
OER Knowledge Cloud - has been established to identify, collect, preserve and disseminate available documents of enduring value to researchers, industry, government, scholars, writers, historians, journalists and informal learners.
4. Resource, creation, discovery, delivery & promotion
Connecting the Dots will cover the Saylor Foundation’s open content aggregation process for free college-level courses - To address the content issues generated by navigating the OER landscape such as, disaggregation, lack of context, narrow subject range, varied quality, reinvention and reproduction, the Saylor Foundation, has developed a structured content curation process where practitioners vet,contextualise and add existing resources.
Using Open Technologies to Support a Healthy OER Life Cycle - Vivien Rolfe, De Montfort University, UK - Simon Griffin, Griffin Internet Marketing, UK - Strategies for promoting OER resources such as, search engine optimised websites, social networking, mediated by https://posterous.com/, which were used to promote the Virtual Analytic Laboratory SCOOTER; Sickle Cell Open and Health and Life Science Open Educational Resources (HALS). Also taking into account producing files in multiple file types to aid reuse.
The Evolvement of Open Educational Resources Ming Nie, University of Leicester, UK - the findings of the EVOL-OER Project, reveal that improving the quality of teaching materials, saving time and scarcity of resources are key drivers for reuse. Changing academic culture and practice, time investment and lack of support are considered key challenges in reuse. Initial evidence also shows that reusers tend to make minimum changes to the original OERs. Their reuse behaviours range from use ‘as is’ to minor changes, such as changing branding, adding acknowledgements, creating an index, removing or replacing activities, and updating content and context. Size, granularity, format of the OER, lack of technical skills and support have so far been reported as the key factors affecting the level of modification. Differences in motivation, challenges and strategies for reuse have been found in different countries. For example, in African countries, lack of access to quality resources is prominent. Limited access to computers and poor internet connections present difficulties and have an impact on the way the reused resources are shared back to the community.
What HumBox did next: real stories of OERs in action from users of a teaching and learning repository for the humanities Kate Borthwick, University of Southampton, UK - The evaluation of the use of Humbox Southampton's Humanities repository, has found that being part of a sharing community is an important driver for delivering OERs
All the resources can be found on Cambridge 12 web site and I would like to acknowledge the authors of the abstracts from the above presentations from which I took some of the content. For me this was one of the most welcoming conferences I have been to, I particularly liked the international perspective and meeting individuals from such varied educational backgrounds, as well as, hearing the stories of how integrating OERs into practice has helped communities overcome significant challenges and barriers. For me, we should never lose sight of the the potential of democratising education via OER and finding ways to enfranchise the disenfranchised, I leave the last words to Gary Matkin, Dean of Continuing Education University of California "Imagine a world in which everyone could learn anything, anywhere, anytime for free".
