It’s all been happening on the OER front recently, with a number of events and materials continuing the amazing work kicked off by the Jisc/Academy UKOER programme.
First up, Lou McGill, Allison Littlejohn and I delivered a webinar for Open Education Week discussing some of the findings of the OER Evaluation and Synthesis project. This has been running for three years in parallel with the main programme, developing and using an evaluation framework to capture what projects have been learning and research has been telling us.
(and was that the mighty LanguageBox sneaking a webinar in there too? Recording to follow, we hope)
You can read more at the Evaluation and Synthesis wiki – this is still a “live” site being added to almost daily, as is the UKOER infokit. Unlike the former, the infokit is deliberately aimed at offering practical advice on the practice of working with OER. Lou McGill deserves plaudits for her sterling work on keeping both of these amazing resources up to date. She’s also found time (how *does* she manage it?) to put together a guide to the growing body of terminology that has grown up around OER and related practice.
The same week saw the JISC CETIS conference in Birmingham, with a superb breakout session on OER and sustainability. Both Lorna Campbell and Phil Barker have blogged their impressions of the session, which featured presentations from a number of key people involved or associated with UKOER. Even ex-JISCer Amber Thomas came along!
CETIS and Amber have also (at last!) been able to release their book, “Into the Wild”, which includes reflections on summaries on the key technological trends of the three years of the programme. You can download it as an .epub, via Kindle, you can even buy it as a proper book with a pretty cover.
It would be the perfect reading material (to prepare for a load of really interesting CETIS-related sessions) on your journey to OER13 if you are one of the more than 200 delegates gathering in Nottingham for this now-annual conference. Jisc and Jorum are proud to be headline sponsors, but the conference is largely self-financing and features an enviable range of speakers. Sessions will be recorded, and you can follow along on twitter using the #oer13 tag or @oer13 account.
And the Welsh are coming too! – with interest from the Welsh Assembly, and task forces and working groups a-plenty around the place, Jisc Regional Support Centre Wales are offering a programme of webinars on open education over the next couple of months.
The Jorum team, never ones to be left behind, have been doing a lot of work behind the scenes… updating and adding functionality to the UK’s OER repository. These changes will make it easier for everyone to find, use and deposit materials.
Not bad for a programme that finished in October 2012, eh? And there is much more to come. UKOER is a neat demonstration of the way in which the effects of programmes continue long after the funding is gone.
And watch out for even more ukoer excitement next week!
You can connect with the community via the OER-DISCUSS mailing list or via the #ukoer hashtag on twitter. To keep up with the latest news you could also follow the @UKOER account.
