OPEN FOR LEARNING

Through the BERLiN project (Building Exchanges for Research and Learning in Nottingham) The University of Nottingham was involved in the JISC/Higher Education Academy funded UK Open Educational Resources (OERs) programme. The programme ran for 12 months from April 2009.

The aim of the programme was to investigate open educational resources to understand the challenges involved for Higher Education Institutions when releasing teaching materials openly over the internet under creative commons licences. Open Educational Resources are learning materials freely available for use, repurpose or redistribution. No formal assessment is undertaken and no credits are awarded. It is essentially a process of sharing knowledge and expertise, making aspects of an institution’s approach to teaching available to other academics and making the content of that teaching available to anyone with an interest in learning.

Creative Commons licences are alternatives to traditional copyright regulations with authors able to dictate and set how others use their work. They allow content creators to publish work online and signal to the world that they are happy for others to use their content in new ways made possible by digital technologies. They also give authors the ability to grant rights to users to copy, share, redistribute and modify resources.

Through the detailed investigations undertaken into OER during the BERLiN project many sources of creative commons resources and images were identified in multiple repositories, search engines and image banks. Having access to such resources provides educators the opportunity to leverage time and cost efficiencies associated with module design and provides access to a rich and varied supply of educational material.

The knowledge gained in this area by the BERLiN project team is being disseminated across the University of Nottingham and beyond to the wider UK OER community through the delivery of a creative commons workshop. The aim of which is to enable the academic community to discover, use, repurpose and attribute resources appropriately in line with their creative commons licence.

This presentation focuses on key aspects covered in the workshop and includes the demonstration of a selection of content rich OER repositories; OER search engines and OER image banks. In addition to the presentation slides, a toolkit designed to help learners and educators harness the power of creative commons resources will be made available. This provides anyone attending the presentation with a comprehensive guide on where to find and how to use the ever growing number of open resources available on the web. The presentation will specifically focus on:

• Why the workshop was created and the issues it was designed to address
• The aims and objectives of the workshop
• Harnessing the power of the web to source resources and images available under creative commons licensing
• Enhancing teaching materials by correctly using and attributing creative commons resources and images
• The benefits and barriers to publishing open educational resources
• The demonstration of a selection of creative commons sites and resources that are licensed for open use