This document discusses open educational resources (OERs) and their role in distance education. It begins with definitions of OERs and examples of notable OER initiatives. It then summarizes research on OERs that found issues with discoverability, lack of context, and a need for communities and tracking of reuse. Practitioners were often unfamiliar with OERs and preferred resources with specific practical applications. Major constraints to using OERs included limited understanding of their value and lack of staff development. Adopting OERs could require training, time for discovery, and developing open access infrastructure and policies across institutions.

1. The role of Open Access and Open
Educational Resources within
Distance Education
Jon Gregson
Stylianos Hatzipanagos
CDE Fellows
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

2. Overview of talk
• OERs: a brief introduction
• Linking previous research to
current investigation
• The programme directors‟
perspective

3. What are OERs?
Open Educational Resources are teaching,
Definitions
learning or research materials that are in
the public domain or released with an
intellectual property license that allows for
free use, adaptation, and distribution.
(UNESCO)
Open Educational Resources (OER) are
teaching and learning materials that are
freely available online for everyone to use,
whether you are an instructor, student or
self-learner. Examples of OER include: full
courses, course modules, syllabi,
lectures, homework assignments,
quizzes, lab and classroom activities,
pedagogical materials, games,
simulations, and many more resources
contained in digital media collections
from around the world. (JISC)

4. Notable
OER initiatives
 MIT‟s Open Courseware
initiative
 Open University‟s OpenLearn
 JISC: project work
 Jorum is the national
repository for teaching and
learning materials (many are
OERs)
 MERLOT
 OERs and MOOCs
http://www.flickr.com/photos/everton137/7027227731/sizes/m/in/photostream/

5. OERs vs. or in support of academic
practice
 Displaced from proprietary „silos‟, i.e. the institutional
VLEs.
 Copyright „free‟, as contributions to collective
knowledge.
 Most often come against recent improvements in
creation of e-learning content. They are frequently
didactic in nature.
 They are often elliptical shells to fill in with context
and meaning. Context and wrap around activities
are missing.
 Interactive aspects and their learning design are
separated from content and are often implicit rather
than explicit.
Hatzipanagos 2012

6. What we learnt from practitioners and
librarians about OERs and their use (1)
 Discoverability in repositories
 Lack of context a major obstacle
 An OER tracking tool that would demonstrate trail of use and or
/repurposing was considered valuable. JISC funded project OER
Track
 Materials in OERs need to be complemented by the teacher input,
„presence‟.
 There is a desire for a community of teachers to share.
 OERs and professional/academic development
Secker & Hatzipanagos 2012

7. What we learnt from practitioners &
librarians about OERs and their use (2)
Role of OERs
 Different categories of stakeholders have different views on
how to share
 VLEs and OERs: institutional investment vs. sharing and
opening up – OERs valuable for an institutional reputation
 OERs as an important set of materials for international sharing
in learning and teaching
 A capacity building role for OERs.
Secker & Hatzipanagos 2012

8. What we have learnt from practitioners
librarians about OERs and their use (3)
 Finding OERs
 OERs as meta-Google
 ITunes/eBooks as OERs: overcoming the proprietary
issues to create OERs
 Networks of people putting information together
 How do people find OER? By searching? By sharing?
By recommending in social networks?
Secker & Hatzipanagos 2012

9. What we have learnt from practitioners
librarians about OERs and their use (4)
Evaluation of OERs
 An evaluation/review system should be an integral part
of the online repository of OERs
 Can‟t evaluate until you have used – but then should
OERs be quality reviewed before they are released?
Secker & Hatzipanagos 2012

10. What we have learnt from practitioners
librarians about OERs and their use (5)
Metadata and OERs: creating context
 Importance of contextualising resources.
 Importance of comprehensive metadata which
repositories often lacks.
 Value of metadata in repositories
 Who creates the metadata? whose role is to complete
the metadata – librarians or teaching practitioners ?
Teaching practitioner or someone familiar with web
technologies?
Secker & Hatzipanagos 2012

11. Evaluation of engagement with
OERs, practitioners
 Workshops: most practitioners not familiar with OER,
strong academic development aspect of engagement.
 Reusabilty/repurposing focus of workshops: preference
for „useful, specific and practical OERs‟.
 “Context often missing”, preference for reusable rather
than repurposable.
 Main potential benefit of OERs: „improved learning‟ and
less „saving on academic time to develop appropriate
material/content‟.
(Hatzipanagos 2012)

12. Responses from UoL
practitioners
Within your UoLIP programme do you
make use of open access materials
(i.e. open access journals, open
educational resources (OERs) etc.)?
 4 YES, 2 NO
Do you encourage your UoLIP
students to make use of such
materials?
• 4 YES, 2 NO
Are you familiar with different
types of creative commons
licences?
 4 YES, 2 NO
Qualitative questions:

13. Do you think a collaborative scheme for drawing together an OA
repository across the colleges involved in the UoLIP would be
useful?
Mixed responses:
 Not really -the world of OER is not static enough to make it
meaningful other than a snapshot of that day…
 Yes. I expect there may be some overlap between subject
materials of interest to our students and students of
computational courses provided by Royal Holloway and LSE.

14. What do you consider to be the major constraints in
using OERs?
1. limited understanding of their value
2. cultural resistance – a „new thing‟, „not developed here‟, „can
we trust it‟ ? etc.
and
1. lack of staff development to create awareness of OERs in this
area

15. What do you consider to be the main resource
implications, when adopting OERs?
1. training for academics to create awareness of OERs
2. time to search and explore repositories of OERs
3. limited number of OERs in my discipline
4. perhaps less effort to maintain than institutional resources
5. like most „e‟ advancements, the development of OER eassessment materials is time and resource intensive in the
short term, but should result in cost/time savings in the
medium/long term.

16. The emergent landscape
in OER use
 Librarians seem to take the lead in the OER campaign.
 Practitioners not familiar with OER: strong academic
development aspect of any engagement activity
 Searchability/discoverability still an overall issue.
 Disciplinarity: a complex landscape.

17. Questions for discussion
1. What would be the advantages and disadvantages of OA for ODL
suppliers (consider reading and other course materials and
resources)
2. What would be the advantages and disadvantages of OA for ODL
students
3. How could we set up an OA infrastructure for UoLIP that would
draw on the expertise of the Colleges, and also add value to their
own offerings ?
4. Who within UoLIP is best placed to champion OA?
5. What capacity building is needed in UoLIP to develop OA
approaches ?
6. What would a suitable policy for OA look like? (Think of required
themes/components)

18. Any comments?
 Email
 Stylianos at
 s.hatzipanagos@kcl.ac.uk
 Jon at