Round Up

[Simon Thomson]

I thought that as we come to the end of month 3 of the project I would try and sum up where we are. Since the start of the project I have been conscious that we really need to be prepared as a team for September, knowing that we have OER content available is very important.

At this stage we have identified over 1300 hours of content for depositing on the institutional repository (and eventually on JORUM). We still have some IPR issues to resolve and may need to review all the content before it can go on to the repository. Currently if staff deposit material into the repository they are responsible for the IPR clearance, but at this stage I am not wishing to "scare" staff off so the Faculty teams will hopefully check IPR (I have a meeting on Monday to outline the process).
Some of the content has already been cleared of IPR because it is already available as a learning resource in one way or another publicly.

I have arranged for the Unicycle project to be promoted at the Staff Development festival this year (7th-11th September 2009) and for 4 workshops to be run throughout the year as part of the institutional staff development programme. These workshops I hope will give staff hands on experience of submitting and searching for oer material.

Also in September the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning in Reusable Learning Objects (RLO-CETL) from Cambridge University will be running a workshop with us at Leeds Met, the outputs of which will also go into the OER repository. http://www.ucel.ac.uk/rlo-cetl/index.html

We plan to run an OER awareness session in each Faculty early in the academic year to encourage more use of OER and also to highlight OER as a key element of the ALT strategy in 2009/10. - 20% of people who undertook the poll on this site did not know what OER was.

The main task over the next couple of months is to get the materials which have already been identified on to the institutional repository ready for use by the pilot modules in September 2009/10.

Which reminds me - I have 2 pilot modules but really need a minimum of 4 so if you are reading this and think "Let me get involved" please get in touch.

Would like to discuss with other institutional OER projects how we might collaborate in the dissemination of the projects. Personally I feel that a joint dissemination event will have a wider impact than individual one's.

Please let me know your thoughts.