OERs: Educational Fad or a Substantial Contribution to

Educational Provision? Reykjavík: November 21st. 2011.

Helen Lentell Fellow in Distance Learning, University of Leicester, UK

Helen Lentell. Reykjavik, Iceland 2

The term OER is wide and all embracing – it includes different kinds of digital assets: full courses, course materials, content modules, learning objects, collections, even books and journals that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others.

Definitions often also include the software tools that support the creation, delivery and use of OERs.

For the purposes of this talk an OER is taken to be something substantial e.g. a course module or a full course .

What is an OER?

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Helen Lentell. Reykjavik, Iceland 3

Millions of learning objects exist, but accessing and making use of these objects is highly problematic.

Complete courses/modules, more likely to impact on educational up-scaling than small bite sized objects.

Education is more than the delivery of knowledge and information.

Education is a formal and structured learning process that is assessed and accredited.

Access to bite sized OERs does not solve the problem of scaling up educational provision. (But access to the resources of others might help individual teachers. )

The decision to utilise OERs is transformative to pedagogy and the systems that support teaching and learning

OERs for education

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Helen Lentell. Reykjavik, Iceland 4

Why are universities giving away their intellectual property?

Do their reasons matter?How can we use their OERs?What must we do?

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OERs are provider led – counters what we know about designing courses for learners

Learning from the past: ◦ COL/WADE and the review of masters courses in

DL– courses very different ◦ TESSA◦ Staff Development in Distance Education for

Caribbean, African and Pacific Universities Policy issues – e.g. structure, assignments,

up-dating, embedded copy right,

Taking ownership of OERs

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Needs analysis Effective identification of target learners Defining effective learning outcomes Developing objectives & ensuring content matches Revising & rewriting content Creating appropriate learner activities for context Integrating appropriate media Developing assignments & assessments Adapting from one format to another (e.g. F2f to e-

learning) Sourcing OERs (use of repositories and OER search

engines) Financial planning = NEW WAYS OF WORKING

New Skills

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Collegial working with people with different but complementary skills

Project management – curriculum processes have to be managed

The rebirth of the instructional designer Transformational to pedagogy Leadership and Management

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New Ways of Working

Helen Lentell. Reykjavik, Iceland 8

Sharing resources – not new Sharing teaching resources between teachers is not a

game changer Universities that share resources are not doing this for

the betterment of the world but might be a bi-product It’s never as simple or as cheap as some like to think. The game changer is OERs that are substantial – e.g.

whole courses/programmes. And Skills to adapt and contextualise OERs to users needs.

Which means New ways of working, and institutional leadership and

support for those working with them

To summerise: Key points

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Helen Lentell. Reykjavik, Iceland 921/11/2011

Takk fyrir

Helen Lentell. Reykjavik, Iceland 10

My favourites http://oyc.yale.edu/

http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1804/

http://www.col.org/Pages/default.aspx

http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/

http://www.ted.com/

http://www.oerafrica.org/

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