Free Open Educational Resources (OER)

by Dewi Parry

I went to an OER workshop a couple of weeks ago, run by CoPILOT (Community of Practice for Information Literacy Online Teaching), and I promised to let Catherine know what went on! So I thought it would be a good idea to share some of the resources on the blog, along with some other OER related materials.

Let us know what you think of them and forward them on to your staff to have a look at if you think they are of value (This is by no way a full list of OER resources – it’s just a starting point).

Jorum – http://www.jorum.ac.uk/

Funded by Jisc, Jorum is the place where you will find free OERs shared and created under CC licenses by those who teach in or create content for HE and FE in the UK. It is possible to find and use thousands of free resources from a wide variety of subject areas. (really impressed with this, and think it could be a valuable resource if pushed within the University). Here is a case study Simon passed over to me, from SOCSI’s Luke Sloan, who has found using Jorum really useful.

Here’s a video showing how to search for OERs on Jorum:

How to find OER? 

I also came across this resource during the workshop: The OER Landscape – How to find OER?This page consists of a vast list of OER Repositories and OER Initiatives/Projects from all over the world. (It’s big, and well worth a look!).

Welsh Educational Resources

In a meeting of the Coleg Cymraeg last week, I met with staff from OpenLearn Cymru (An initiative by the Open University) – a suite of resources through the medium of Welsh (initially – they are looking at bilingual delivery also). You can browse the subject categories to discover articles, watch videos and interact with features created by our academic experts and guest contributors.

Positive use of OER

A recent HEA Article – Learner attitudes to Open Educational Resources (OERs). A report presenting findings of a study commissioned by the HEA and conducted by the NUS has found that on the whole students are positive about the use of OERs: Students’ views on learning methods and Open Educational Resources in higher education.

OER WALES CYMRU

OER WALES CYMRU have a project website, that gives you an idea of what they are up to. You can also follow them on twitter: @OERwales_cymru.

CC Webinar

On the subject of CC licenses, ALT will be running a free webinar on Creative Commons on Thursday 11th December at 1pm. Vivien Sieber and Pete Collins – Educational Technologist at Jorum. The session will demonstrate how simple it is to use CC licences and what they mean in practice

Additional Links

More links on openness and OER sent over by @JoeNicholls , using CMAPS (thanks Joe, very useful indeed):

Directory Listing

Open Educational Resources i

Open Educational Resources ii

While writing this blog post, Dewi has been listening to: Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci – If fingers were xylophones (1995)