Open Educational Resources

The ongoing JISC/Academy Open Educational Resources Programme is addressing many issues around open institutional repositories.

The global open education movement has become a significant driver for individuals and institutions as they realise the potential benefits to opening up their teaching and learning materials. These benefits are different for each stakeholder group - these are usefully described in the Open Educational Resources infokit.

Widely available learning content, and informational content, is fundamentally changing the relationship between students and their institutions as sources of expertise. This presents a challenge to existing models of the production of academic knowledge and the role of the institution in supporting student learning. Coupled to this, funding models in Higher Education are changing in response economic pressures, resulting in many institutions re-examining their own business models in response.

As institutions consider new open models they are increasingly seeing the potentials offered by a managed repository (rather than a closed VLE which may contain student data). They need to balance the new drivers for openness with their existing drivers for competitiveness, confidentiality, and integrated institutional systems. Options for institutions include:

• creating a learning and teaching repository which can offer open access (which may have varying degrees of openness)

• adapting an existing open access research repository to include learning and teaching content

• utilising the national open repository - JORUMOpen

• utilising an open VLE system (such as Moodle) as a repository

Individuals may have a mandate to deposit their learning & teaching materials into JORUMOpen (through funded projects), or their institutional repository. They may also have an option of depositing into subject community environments or just publishing openly on the web if they own the content they develop for a particular course (many academics in HE institutions do not own such content). Individuals may need to be presented with an option where they deposit only once (perhaps into their institutional repository) which can feed into other channels.