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

BlogsVideos P2PU

Stian Haklev

Thanks for your attention!!!

Contact details:

JISC CETIS Institute for Educational Cybernetics University of BoltonDeane Road, Bolton,  BL3 5ABTel: +44(0)1204 903851Fax: +44(0)1204 399074email: l.yuan@bolton.ac.ukhttp://jisc.cetis.ac.uk/