1. Supporting teaching in higher education to improve student learning across the Biosciences Open Educational Resources Building open content for the bioscience community

2. Outline Open Educational Resources Background, current status and problems The OER programme How it is being executed and what it means to the centre workload Expected outcomes Critical success factors for the pilot Further information Key links and tags to follow progress

3. About the Project A PILOT project to discover the barriers and issues A ‘significant amount’ of material for release An opportunity for the Centre to provide resources to support practical work

4. What is an OER? Creating educational resources for sharing and further development Easy to find (fully described) Easy to use (context and guidance available) Quality assured (authentic) Re-purposable, and shared for further development. Key communities OER CommonsOER Commons, OCW Consortium, CCLearnOCW ConsortiumCCLearn “Reuse, Redistribute, Revise, and Remix”

5. Problems OER has to tackle OER ‘culture’ slow to pick up in UK HE Is sharing resources financially viable? IPR clearance Discovery, tagging and branding, Individual Academic profile Inter-institutional dependencies Worldwide profile for UK HE

6. The OER programme Initiated by HEFCE/JISC and delivered by JISC/Academy Pilot project for a £25m? programme (2009-2012) Pilot phase £5.7m (April 2009-April 2010) <£3m for 12 Subject Centres to run projects Not buying rights to old resources! But re-purposing existing, valued content demonstrating various approaches Cultural change and sustainable processes Content is an indicator of processes in place – a metric Sustained release – institutional IPR policies updated Benefits for academic profile, institutional profile, discipline profile and their students

7. The current environment Our communities are now distributed throughout a complex series of online networks

8. Funded projects Institutional, Subject and Individual strands Coventry - Open Content Employability Exeter - Open Exeter Leeds Met - Unicycle Leicester University - OTTER Nottingham University - BERLiN Oxford University - Open Spires Staffordshire University - OpenStaffs York, Westminster, Oxford Brookes, Falmouth, Anglia Ruskin, UCL, UCLAN, Lincoln and Bradford

9. Funded projects SC LLAS (Southampton), ENG (Royal Holloway), PRS (Leeds), HCA (Durham) The HumBox Project SC ICS (Ulster) Open Educational Repository in Support of Computer Science SCEngineering (Loughborough) Open Educational Resources Pilot SC UKCME (Liverpool)) CORE-Materials: Collaborative Open Resource Environment – for Materials SC Economics (Bristol) TRUE: Teaching Resources for Undergraduate Economics SC Physical Sciences (Hull/Liverpool) Skills for Scientists SC GEES (Plymouth) C-change in GEES: Open licensing of climate change and sustainability resources in the Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences SC ADM (Brighton) Open Educational Resources in Art, Design and Media SC MSOR (Nottingham Trent) FETLAR (Finding electronic teaching learning and assessment resources) SC Bioscience (Leeds) ‘An Interactive Laboratory and Fieldwork Manual for the Biosciences’ SC UKCLE (Warwick) Simulation Learning Resources SC HSAP (KCL) Public Health Open Resources in the University Sector (PHORUS) SC C-SAP (Southampton) Evaluating the practice of collective endeavour in opening up key resources for learning and teaching in the social sciences SC MEDEV (Newcastle) Organising Open Educational Resources (OOER) Subject strand

10. Our work Ten project ‘consortia’ with Bioscience Nottingham: Biodiversity Oxford: iCases – Influenza outbreak DeMontfort: Virtual Analytical Laboratory OU: Biochemistry virtual laboratories Bath: Cancer Biology UCL: Virtual museum for zoology Glasgow: Virtual Ecology Gloucestershire: Java-based Rocky Shore simulation Leeds: Microbiology labs (10 tutorials and exercises) Manchester: Genetic Analysis scenarios

11. Our work Contributing existing resources (reworking for open release) Output into JorumOpen Resolving IPR using standard licences (e.g. CC-BY-NC-SA) Sharing IPR successes through network Cataloguing issues – Jorum support Managing the project - Sharepoint

12. Key Issues and outcomes IPR cleared content for re-use and redevelopment Use of appropriate descriptive meta-data Dissemination and distribution from key repositories and source providers Sustainability – a 5 year minimum expected Raised OER awareness Final Report

13. Follow developments Tags: OER and UKOER (or #OER and #UKOER) in online updates Academy OER newsfeed (soon) Open Education News Cetis: Educational ContentEducational Content Bioscience OER blog and project partner blogs Bioscience OER blog

14. Press coverage in 2009/10 Guardian Daily TelegraphDaily Telegraph, Times Higher Education Independent Sunday Times Further project links Open Educational Resources programme