SHARING OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES (OER) EXPERIENCE (What Do We Know?)

1. SHARING OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES (OER) EXPERIENCE(What Do We Know?) Presented by Bernard Acquah Obeng (Ph.D.)

2. Presentation Outline • What are OER? • Elements of OER • Why use OER? • How to use OER? • Where can I find OER? • How to evaluate OER? • Looking ahead

3. What are OER? • "Digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research" (OECD, 2007). • According to William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, OER are teaching, learning, and research resources 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.

4. What are the Elements of OER? Open educational resources include: • Learning content:Full courses, course materials, content modules, learning objects, collections, and journals. • Tools: Software to support the creation, delivery, use and improvement of open learning content. Example labspace. • Implementation resources: Intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design-principles, and localization of content. • Best Practices: Stories, publication, techniques, methods, processes, incentives, distribution.

5. Why Use OER? • Quality can be improved and the cost of content development reduced by sharing and reusing. • There's a need to look for new models of module production and presentation. • They can speed up the development of new learning resources, stimulate internal improvement, innovation and reuse. • Because of the flexibility of OER materials, you can make them relevant to your needs. • Visit JISC Open Educational Resources infoKit for more information about the benefits of using OER.

6. How to Use OER? • OER Handbook for Educators is also a useful starting point.

7. Where Can I find OER? General ‘Repositories’ or Collections: • Cloudworks: Links to OER repositories • OpenLearn (labspace) • Jorum • OER Commons • 100 Best Open Educational Resources on the Web • http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/2318/links#contribute • http://labspace.open.ac.uk/ • http://www.jorum.ac.uk/ • http://www.oercommons.org/ • http://www.mastersdegreeonline.net/blog/2009/the-100-best-open-education-resources-on-the-web/

8. Open Educational Resources Search Engines • JISC Infonet OER toolkit lists links to specialist search engines and the UNESCO OER toolkit which lists specialist search engines, and general repositories • Another useful resource is the OER Recommender

9. How to Evaluate OER? Important attributes of quality OERs include:-  • Accuracy • Reputation of author/institution • Standard of technical production • Accessibility • Fitness for purpose • Clear rights declarations e.g. Creative Commons • If you would like to explore more issues around quality visit the JISC Open Educational Resources infoKit quality considerations web page.

10. Looking Ahead Sharing OER Experience Using OER in Business Schools in Ghana: What we have learnt from The Open University Business School study tour. THANK YOU