Abstract:

Open Educational Resources (OER) can play a central part in the changing landscape of higher education. There are many benefits for institutions to realise when publishing open resources, including efficiency savings, promotional opportunities and improving the student experience.

Through the BERLiN project, a 12 month JISC/Higher Education Academy funded project, the University of Nottingham investigated factors fundamental to the success of OER initiatives with the findings highly relevant to international education contexts. In addition, a significant amount of Nottingham’s teaching and learning materials have been published openly on Nottingham’s open educational repository ‘U-Now’.

The development and wide distribution of open learning resources is a key strategic driver for Nottingham, in particular supporting the University’s international strategy of ‘knowledge without borders’ and fostering interaction with prospective and existing students in order to complement their studies, as well as building connections with other higher education institutions nationally and internationally.

Throughout the BERLiN project a number of issues relating to publishing open resources were identified and addressed including the presentation of content for ease of use, adaptation and re-use, the need to cater for multiple audiences with differing resource and search requirements and the level of support required during early stages of open educational resource production but also to help establish and embed sustainable publishing practice within an institution thereafter.

This presentation provides an overview of key learnings from the BERLiN project and the approaches taken to address such issues. It also outlines the OER publication model adopted by Nottingham. Specifically it will focus on:

• Engaging the academic community to source open resources
• Packaging resources for open publication using a module framework approach
• Encouraging re-use of open resources
• Making open resources discoverable
• Considering consumer led models
• Dealing with copyright and intellectual property rights issues

This presentation also includes a demonstration of Nottingham’s Open Educational Repository ‘Unow’ and a selection of resources that have been published openly by Nottingham academics.

Keywords:

Open Educational Resources, UKOER, The BERLiN Project, Publishinh open resources, IPR, copyright, U-NOW, Re-use.