1. The ICS Open Educational Resources project
An Open Educational Repository in support of Computer Science is a project
funded by JISC and the HEAcademy in the UK. The repository hosts OER in
five different thematic areas of computing science from the project’s five
partner institutions (London Metropolitan University, Sheffield Hallam
University, Teesside University, University of Portsmouth and University of the
West of England, Bristol). Approximately 700 study elements (from existing
lectures, reading lists, tutorial notes, practical notes, assessment exercises
and marking schemes have been made available as OER. It is important to
note in terms of quality that these materials are from award bearing courses.
More information is available at
http://www.ics.heacademy.ac.uk/projects/oer/index.php
At a recent project workshop held at the University of Portsmouth (March
2010) the Project Director Dr Stephen Hagan reported that 210 credits worth
of material from 11 modules were made openly available on OpenJorum.
In terms of quality assurance the material has been taken from validated
programmes of study assessed by external examiners. The OER are tagged
using a wide diverse approach so that students as well as lecturers can
search for material of interest. They started by supplying many tags though
over time the number will be reduced depending on how often they are used
to access material. Issues and difficulties arose with ownership of material
and consortium agreements.
At the same workshop Simon Fraser indicated that the original materials were
in the form of PowerPoint slides, Word documents, text, video files, and PDF.
The OER from the project accounts for one third of the material presently
available of OpenJorum.
The lecturers transforming the materials reported that it was difficult to decide
how to develop independent units.