Open Educational Resources and the Future of Higher Education Dr Li Yuan Institute for Educational Cybernetics University of Bolton

Key Concepts

Definition of Openness “Digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self- learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research” (OECD, 2007) “Digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self- learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research” (OECD, 2007)

Components of OERs  Learning Content (full courses, courseware, content modules, learning objects, collections and journals)  Tools (software to support the development, use, re-use and delivery of learning content)  Implementation process (intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials) (OECD, 2007)

The four ‘R’s of openness  Reuse – allow others to freely use all or part of the unaltered, verbatim work.  Redistribute – share copies of the work with others.  Revise – allow to adapt, modify, translate, or change the form of the work  Remix – allow to take two or more existing resources and combine them to create a new resource

What is Creative Commons Creative Commons lets people share their work (photos, writing, etc.) with the world so that anyone can use and remix their creations under the licensing terms the authors provide. It is usually denoted with “Some Rights Reserved” as opposed to “All Rights Reserved.”

License Conditions Attribution (BY), requiring attribution to the original author; Share Alike (SA), allowing derivative works under the same or a similar license (later or jurisdiction version);derivative Non-Commercial (NC), requiring the work is not used for commercial purposes; and No Derivative Works (ND), allowing only the original work, without derivatives. There are four major conditions of the Creative Commons:

Why Open Educational Resources Reduce the costs of education to learners Make education globally accessible Collaborate, share and partner to use and provide open content Increase quality through reusing and localising content Avoid duplication of effort Change a culture

OER initiatives

Examples of OERs MIT OpenCourseWare

Examples of OERs OpenLearn/ Open University UK

Examples of OERs China Open Resource for Education (CORE)

UK OER Programme OpenSpires - University of Oxford

JorumOpen/UKOERs UK OER Programme

Impacts on Higher Education

Content is infrastructure “We must deploy a sufficient amount of content, on a sufficient number of topics, at a sufficient level of quality, available at sufficiently low cost before we can expect large scale educational experimentation and innovation”. David Wiley, 2007

“The UK must have a core of open access learning resources organised in a coherent way to support on-line and blended learning by all higher education institutions and to make it more widely available in non-HE environments”. On-line Innovation in Higher Education Sir Ron Cooke (2008) The UK Vision of OERs

OERs and the Future of Higher Education Higher Education OERs Learning Communities Learners’ Support Credit on Demand

Learning with experts and communities

Blogs Videos OER course David Wiley

Blogs Videos OER course Stephen Downes

Blogs Videos P2PU Stian Haklev

Thanks for your attention!!! Contact details: JISC CETIS Institute for Educational Cybernetics University of Bolton Deane Road, Bolton, BL3 5AB Tel: +44(0) Fax: +44(0)