Abstracts

OERs matters – vision, reality and uncertainty

Amber Tomas¹, Li Yuan², Liam Earney¹, Chris Pegler³, Mark Stiles⁴, Tom Franklin⁵
¹JISC, United Kingdom,²JISC CETIS, United Kingdom,³The Open University, United Kingdom,⁴Staffordshire University, United Kingdom,⁵Franklin Consulting, United Kingdom

Inspired by initiatives such as MIT OpenCouseWare, the number of Open Educational Resources (OERs) programmes has increased rapidly worldwide and has created a considerable pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for the educator and learner to use. OERs hold the promise of opening up access and improving the quality of higher education around the world. That said, however, a number of key issues remain to be examined. For example, can OERs help higher education to meet the needs of changes in both society and its students by innovating in the areas of openness, connectedness, participation and personalisation? In this symposium, a number of hot topics will be explored, including:• Is it only prestigious institutions that can make a business case for large scale OER initiatives?• Can OERs help institutions to reach a wider population, provide learners with richer learning experiences and lead more learners to accredited courses, including those learners currently under-represented at HE level?• Are publicly-funded OER programmes necessary if resources are available on Youtube/slideshare/Flickr?A brief introduction to the issues will set the scene. A panel drawn from academic research groups, funding bodies and e-learning consultancies will then debate different perspectives on OER via role playing. Some panel members will take a negative position, to open up the debate and the panel will then present suggestions and advice from technical, pedagogical and social perspectives. The audience will be invited to participate. Following the debate, panel members will then summarise and reflect their experiences and views more personally.We envisage that the symposium will help to clarify some of the OER related issues and will challenge the participants to think more deeply about the impacts of OERs in education, as well as further explore and discuss these issues in their own research and OER projects.No references included