Abstract:

Higher Education Institutions are encouraged to share their course materials for the benefit of academics and learners worldwide. Open Educational Resources (OER) are one approach to releasing stored learning materials from closed systems into open systems. An expectation of the approach is to find new learners but also to allow two-way exchange of teaching material between educational providers. However, such exchange is not straightforward to achieve. Experience in transforming closed content into open content has identified issues of infrastructure, technical support, pedagogic design, ownership of tasks, and specification of roles.

The Open University’s OpenLearn initiative established a site for learners to access OER and has built up methods, processes and procedures for transforming material from existing courses into a suitable form for open use. These materials are available for download; re-purposing and re-upload to the OpenLearn LabSpace. However, in the first year of operation relatively low numbers of new or changed courses appeared in the LabSpace. As a result, a parallel project, POCKET (Project on Open Content for Knowledge Exposition and Teaching), was tasked with finding ways for the OpenLearn model of production to be transferable to partner universities whilst providing content for open use in the LabSpace. POCKET is led by the University of Derby and is partnered by The Open University and the Universities of Bolton and Exeter. The emphasis in this paper is on how new content has been brought to the LabSpace as a result of POCKET.

The three campus-based partners are transforming courses of existing and new educational material for open use in the LabSpace whilst building on and improving upon the OpenLearn processes and procedures. At the present time fourteen POCKET units have been published in the LabSpace. In total these units are equivalent to 101 study hours. Twelve of the units are finalised and available under the following topic areas:
- 6 Law units
- 4 Business and management units
- 1 study skills unit
- 1 Mathematics and Statistics unit
Two units are at draft stage and other units are under consideration.

This paper reports on two different approaches to developing POCKET OER. The academics at two universities worked with a Learning Technologist to transform their material into XML for publication as OER. In contrast the academic at another university took on the whole process of transformation. The processes adopted are evaluated using the following data collection tools:
- Participant reflections:
- Pro forma for academics,
- Interviews with transformer(s),
- Workshop(s).

The early findings suggest that the smaller POCKET team simplified the process of transforming educational course material into open content, though throughput of material is likely to be less than from the much larger OpenLearn team. Individual reworking was less successful but would be aided by new templates.

Factors, valuable to the POCKET transformation process, were:
- Pedagogic support,
- Guidance with respect to OpenLearn policies and procedures,
- Technical help, and
- The need to streamline processes placing new content on OpenLearn

This paper reports initial evaluation findings from POCKET, funded by the United Kingdom Joint Information Systems Committee.

Keywords:

open educational resources, open education, openlearn units, pocket units, international.