OER1148 Oral Presentation pptx

Wednesday 11 May 16.50 Cockcroft Theatre

Evidence from the OER landscape

Patrick McAndrew, Tina Wilson & Karen Cropper, Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University
Cathy Casserly, Carnegie Foundation

Conference Theme: OER strategy and sustainability

Abstract: Initiatives to support Open Educational Resources (OER) have been operating for over 10 years and yet the result of these interventions is still questioned. In this presentation we will look at the way in which we might expect to have achieved an impact across different levels: the individual, the discipline, the organization and at government level. The discussion will focus on the ways in which that impact can be observed in terms of policy, design, infrastructure and social models (McAndrew & Cropper, 2010). Use and re-use will be considered, however the focal point will be the cultural changes that are essential for effect strategy and to sustain OER. Some of the required changes are incremental and evolutionary but OER also offers the scope for high impact radical change that may offer the only answer to some of the demands of expansion and efficiency now being asked of the education sector (McAndrew, Scanlon & Clow, 2010).
The data used to support the argument that we make will include direct institutional experience, research across OER providers and users and a report-based analysis of the experience of over 100 funded projects. We will also describe work on connecting these observations with other views of the OER world to provide a mapping of the opportunities and initiatives as part of a series of consultations and workshops. These are developing towards an understanding of the OER area expressed through analytical mapping of the data, shared through the Cohere collective intelligence tool (Buckingham Shum, 2008). However there remains an important human element in researching and presenting the results of this work and selecting the type of map that communicates information so that it helps promote the options and allows those involved to position their own contribution. The community element in developing these maps will also be explored to allow those participating in this conference to contribute to the collective intelligence needed to refine the maps and make them valuable.

Keywords: mapping; analysis; sustainability

References:

Buckingham Shum, S. (2008) “Cohere: Towards Web 2.0 Argumentation,” in Computational Models of Argument: Proceedings of COMMA 2008, Ph. Besnard et al., eds. pp. 97–108. Amsterdam: IOS Press.

McAndrew, P., Scanlon, E. and Clow, D.(2010). An Open Future for Higher Education. EDUCAUSE Quarterly, 33(1). http://oro.open.ac.uk/21894/

McAndrew, Patrick and Cropper, Karen (2010). Open Learning Network: the evidence of OER impact. In: Open Ed 2010: The Seventh Annual Open Education Conference, 2-4 November 2010, Barcelona, Spain. http://oro.open.ac.uk/23824/