Abstract:

For Distance Teaching Universities (DTU’s), the internationalization of their programs is a complicated issue. Regular universities simply send their students to a foreign university and the academic infrastructure – i.e. student exchange programs of different kinds – is set up in such a way that it directly supports this type of internationalization (i.e. student exchange). In the case of DTU’s, however, things are different in that the DTU students cannot be sent abroad. More often than not, these students simply do not have the time to spend several months in another country.

Clearly, this is why DTU’s have a keen interest in course exchange. More often than not, however, course exchange turns out to be highly complicated due to the differences between DTU’s, both in terms of their pedagogic and educational traditions and in terms of all kinds of legal issues. This is why the concept of complementary course production – this concept was developed by Trevor Herbert of the OUUK – is interesting in that this concept involves international co-operation without students having to travel abroad. Complementary course production is tantamount to the following: several DTU’s agree on a specific theme for a new course. Each participating institution makes its own course, on the understanding that all materials which are produced and used by the participating institutions are offered as open education resources. In this way each participating institution may profit from – and use and adapt – all the materials prepared by all the participants.

Evidently, in this connection the question arises to what an extent open educational resources can easily be used as building blocks for a course offered by another university. In order to come to grips with this question, the Faculty of Humanities of the Dutch Open University has set up a pilot to investigate the usability of all open educational resources relating to the topic of ‘heritage’ offered by the OUUK on OpenLearn. In this presentation the results of this pilot will be presented.

Keywords:

Internationalization, open educational resources.