Abstract:

Open educational resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed teaching, learning and research materials that are useful for teaching, learning and assessing. This concept was firstly coined at UNESCO's 2002 Forum on the impact of Open Courseware (OCW). That same year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) launched the OCW initiative in order to publish online course materials, providing open and free access to its materials for educators, students, and individual learners around the world.

Since then, the number of courses and the initiatives related to open education have never stopped growing. In order to coordinate the development of OCW materials and to extend their scope and impact, the OCW Consortium (now renamed as Open Education Consortium) was created in 2005. At present, more than 260 Universities and institutions working on open education from around the world collaborate in this Consortium, which provides access to more than 26,000 free online courses. In this context, the concept of Reusable Learning Objects (RLO), which can be reused in multiple instructional contexts such as the OCW, emerges as independent and self-contained learning elements, done in digital format with a pedagogical purpose. Some examples of RLO include wikis, videos, podcasts, etc.

The objective of this paper is to present the methodology followed and the main results achieved to date in a teaching innovation project financed by the University of Zaragoza (Spain) during the academic years 2015-16 and 2016-17. In this project, more than 20 reusable learning objects are being developed as RLO in the form of educational videos under Creative Commons licenses. The aim is to promote self-learning and to improve the learning outcomes of six subjects in the field of Thermodynamics and Thermal Engineering, which are currently taught in four different degree courses. In order to assess the improvement achieved in the teaching-learning process through the educational videos, different questionnaires for the students have been designed and launched. Initially all the videos and questionnaires are only accessible through a Moodle site to the students enrolled in the six subjects. However, at the end of this project, all the educational videos will be published within the OCW platform of the University of Zaragoza, integrating them in a free and consistent way in an OCW specifically designed to support the study of thermodynamics and thermal engineering fundamentals. In this way, the project is in line with the “four R’s of openness” framework, which includes the possibility of reusing, redistributing, revising and remixing all the learning objects developed.

So far, the results show that most students are satisfied or very satisfied with this innovation experience. In this sense, they consider that the use of educational videos has improved their learning process, increasing their motivation to study and helping them understand the most complicated topics.

Keywords:

RLO, OCW, OER, educational videos, teaching innovation.