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Emerging themes: OER expertise

Page history last edited by Anna Gruszczynska 12 years, 8 months ago

Below you will find excerpts from conversations during project meetings and responses to reflexive tasks which touch upon issues of OER expertise.

1. Excerpt from phone conversation with Delyth and Dafydd, related to reflexive task 2 ("Exploring OERs")

The experience of repurposing the SPSS resource has flagged up some technical issues involved in OER creation – the resource comes with some videos embedded, Dafydd discovered he will need access to the source files and will be contacting people at OpenLearn. This brings up questions of the level of technical expertise needed to repurpose OERs, when Dafydd started on the project he did not really have a sense of which resources might be “easier” to repurpose in terms of format, realises now that maybe searching for a particular format could be a good solution for colleagues with lower levels of technical expertise. Dafydd is fairly experienced with tools such as Captivate, however he recognises that most colleagues will not have created materials with this – so in introducing new people to OER it’s important not to conflate or prioritise certain technical approaches as the normative solution.

2. Excerpt from discussions during the 20 January partner meeting

We touched upon issues related to OER expertise – there is an implicit tension within the OER movement, on the one hand OERs are meant to be designed in such a way that theoretically any user could pick up the resource and repurpose/re-mix it; on the other hand, there is a body of expertise emerging in the context of the OER programme. Moreover, experiences of colleagues on the project demonstrate that they need the support of the project to be able to overcome some of the technical barriers they have encountered (for instance Dafydd’s experiences with the OpenLearn module); Phil and Craig also mentioned implicit knowledge related to judging the quality of the OERs they found.

We also touched upon some related debates of interest – the debate around RLOs (reusable learning objects, in many ways a predecessor of OERs) as well as the Ron Cooke report (On-line Innovation in Higher Education) which in many ways inspired the OER pilot programme.