The goal is to create premium courses, enhance learning and change college (http://oli.cmu.edu). Tidewater Neighborhood College, which provide Z-courses (absolutely no courses) meaning that no books are required, providing students a terrific return on their educational financial investment (https://www.tcc.edu). From the resources listed above, which are just a couple of compared to the multitude offered online, it appears that numerous higher education institutions are actively included in the creation and distribution of OERs, with the objective of enhancing academic outcomes and advancing the scholarship and practice of learning and teaching.
Since our company believe its crucially essential to support our policy and vision with support. I wish to focus now on some of the benefits of OER and I'm going to highlight these benefits with case research studies from the University of Edinburgh. So firstly open licences help to make sure longevity of access to academic resources.
I'm sure you'll all have come tasks that produced content only for those resources to be come unattainable once the job ends or great teaching and learning materials belonging to a colleague who has actually consequently retired or moved on, and no one rather understands if they can still be utilized or not.
This is a phenomenon that my colleague Melissa Highton has referred to as copyright financial obligation. If you don't get the licensing right very first time round it will cost you to repair it further down the line. And this is one of the best strategic factors for purchasing open educational resources at the institutional level.
Continued access to educational resources can be especially bothersome when it comes to MOOCs. MOOC material often gets locked into industrial platforms, despite whether it is freely licensed, and some platforms are now time frame access to content. So at the University of Edinburgh we are ensuring that all the content we have actually produced for our MOOCs is likewise freely offered under open licence to download from our Open Media Bank on our Media Hopper platform.
So for example A number of studies have revealed that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual health is not well-covered in Medical curricula, nevertheless knowledge of LGBT health and of the level of sensitivities needed to deal with LGBT patients are important skills for certifying physicians. Using materials from the commons, a project at the University of Edinburgh looked for to attend to the absence of mentor on LGBT health within the curriculum through OER.
New open resources consisting of digital stories tape-recorded from patient interviews and resources for Secondary School children of any ages were also developed and released as CC BY OER. OER can also help to improve digital skills for both staff and students. 23 Things for Digital Knowledge is an award winning, open online course run by my colleague Stephanie Farley.
Learners spend a little time every week, developing up and expanding their digital skills and are motivated to share their experiences with others.
All course content and materials are accredited under a CC BY licence and the University actively encourages others to take and adjust the course. The course has actually currently been used by lots of individuals and organisations outwith Edinburgh and it has recently been adapted for use by the Scottish Social Providers Council as 23 digital capabilities to support practice and learning in social services.
One initiative that does this is the School of Geosciences Outreach and Engagement course. Over two terms, trainees undertake an outreach project that communicates an aspect of GeoSciences outside the university community. Trainees have the chance to deal with schools, museums, outside centres and neighborhood groups to produce a wide variety of resources for science engagement including classroom mentor products, brochures, websites, and smartphone/tablet applications.
A crucial element of the Geosciences Outreach and Engagement Course is to develop resources with a legacy that can be reused and disseminated for usage by other neighborhoods and organisations. And the University is now taking this one action further by repurposing some of these products to develop open instructional resources.
For example this resource on sea level variation is developed for trainees learning Geography at 3rd and 4th level of the Scottish Curriculum for Quality and it can be downloaded under a CC BY Share alike license from Open. Ed and TES. Open access makes research study outputs easily available to all.
However it is not always simple for those outwith academia to know how to access these outputs, even though they are freely and honestly available. In order to address this issue and to foster innovation transfer and development, we have actually created a series of open instructional resources in the type of video interviews, case studies and finding out materials called Innovating with Open Understanding.
The resources concentrate on developing digital and data literacy abilities and search techniques and function case study interviews with innovative individuals and business owners engaging with the University of Edinburgh's world class research study outputs. Innovating with Open Understanding demonstrates how to find and use Open Access scholarly works, open research information, archival image collections, maker spaces and open source software application, and includes interviews about how these resources can be utilized to support imaginative writing, visual research study, resident science, neighborhood engagement, drug discovery and open architecture.
OER can add to the advancement of open understanding and one fantastic way to do this is to engage with the worlds biggest open educational resource, Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a valuable learning tool that can be used to develop a wide variety of digital and information literacy abilities at all levels across the curriculum nevertheless it is not without bias.
