Reflexive task 1: Delyth and Dafydd


Link to the task

 

This is a joint contribution from Delyth and Dafydd

 

Open educational resources put simply are those resources that are developed and made freely available to all who are interested – normally though not necessarily on-line. The underlying pedagogy of open resources would also lead colleagues to share those resources with fellow teachers and learners, to welcome input and new resources from other teachers and learners and to build a community of interested scholars (understood in the broadest way possible) that use, reuse and interact with the resources.

 

The potential synergy between the development of Welsh Medium HE teaching and the OER agenda is very strong indeed. Welsh Medium teaching is undertaken across a number of HEIs in Wales and is particularly embedded in Bangor, Aberystwyth and Trinity St Davids. However, even in those institutions with a strong tradition of Welsh Medium teaching initiatives in the past have been piece meal and dependent on the active engagement and enthusiasm of a small number of Welsh speaking staff who are committed to delivering education in Welsh. This context is changing as the Welsh Government has committed to the establishment of a Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol, which will provide increased resources and national strategic planning for the development of Welsh Medium HE.


As part of the emerging Welsh Medium agenda colleagues have become increasingly interested in developing and sharing Welsh Medium resources – and in securing an effective repository for material developed for particular courses that may be retained and / or reused in the future. The desire for a national gateway to such resources has led to the development of ‘Y Porth’ – a national blackboard system hosting a range of resources – both open and restricted. C-SAP funded social science resources are already available on the Porth.

 

We would therefore explain Open Education Resources by reference to some of the resources already available on Y Porth (http://www.porth.ac.uk/en/), but we are particularly keen to develop the range of resources available on Y Porth, to ensure active student engagement with the development of these resources and further to ensure that colleagues less sure of the underlying radical pedagogical imperative behind OERs are encouraged to join in.

Critically we believe that the long standing commitment of Welsh speaking staff along with the increased determination of Government to deliver in this area provides an ideal opportunity for the future development of OERs in the Welsh language context, which could then be used as exemplars to the broader HE sector in Wales and beyond.

 

Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales