Presentation from Dr Stylianos Hatzipanagos (Senior Lecturer in Technology Enhanced Learning, King’s College London) on the use of OERs in distance education. Conducted at the CDE's Research and Innovation in Distance Education and eLearning conference on 19 October 2012.

1. Open Educational Resources in
Distance Education:
Exploring Open Learning in Academic
Practice
Dr Stylianos Hatzipanagos, King‟s College London
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

2. Overview of talk
OER and academic practice
King‟s OER project
Phases of the project
Evaluation
What we learnt

3. Stylianos Hatzipanagos
King‟s
Patricia McKellar UOLIA
Steven Warburton
UOLIA
&
Charles Kasule King‟s
Project Team

4. Open Educational
Resources are teaching,
learning or research
materials that are in the
public domain or
released with an
intellectual property
license that allows for
free use, adaptation,
and distribution.
UNESCO definition

5.  Not reinventing the wheel
 Sharing good practice
 Capacity building
 Breaking down barriers to learning
 Networking between teaching
practitioners
 Cross fertilisation of ideas between
disciplines
 cost‐effective ways of operating /
cost‐saving potential
Value of OERs
Secker & Hatzipanagos 2012

6.  MIT‟s Open Courseware initiative (2001)
 Open University‟s OpenLearn in the UK
 Jorum is the UK national repository for
teaching and learning materials (many
are OERs)
Notable OER initiatives

7. OERs vs. or in support of
academic practice
 Displaced from proprietary „silos‟, i.e. the
institutional VLEs.
 Copyright „free‟, as contributions to collective
knowledge.
 However, most often come against recent
improvements in creation of TEL content:
◦ They are frequently didactic in nature.
◦ They are often elliptical shells to fill in with context
and meaning. Context and wrap around activities are
missing.
◦ Interactive aspects and their learning design are
separated from content and are often implicit rather
than explicit.

8.  A CDE teaching and research award
project
 Collaborative: King‟s and University of
London International Programmes
(Law)
OERs in DL:
adopting a model of open learning in
academic practice

9.  Develop and evaluate a set of OERs in academic
practice to be used by ODL Tutors in HE including
global institutional providers.
 Investigate appropriate format and environment
for sharing the developed OERs.
 Evaluate the quality and uptake of these OERs.
 Engage users/tutors with the concept of OERs by
exposing them to the concept of open learning.
 Investigate drivers and barriers in the adoption
of OERs.
Aims and purpose

10.  Audit of resources at
King‟s/International Programmes
 Selected content based on suitability as
OER
 Converted material
 Deposited content - locally and in
Jorum
 Quality control and evaluation
 Dissemination and publicity
What we did?
http://delilaopen.wordpress.com

11.  Phase One: identified existing
institutional teaching resources that can
be repurposed into OERs
 Phase Two: repurposed the identified
teaching resources and developed them
as OERs
 Phase Three: linked to policies,
guidelines and documentation that
currently exist in relation to the
provision of OER as an online resource
for practitioners who want to explore or
use OERs.

12. CORRE framework

13. Phase Four: evaluated the OERs with an
identified group of ODL tutors from the Laws
programme.
Attributes of quality that will be evaluated include:
 Accuracy
 Reputation of author/institution
 Standard of technical production
 Accessibility
 Fitness for purpose
 Clear rights declarations
 Uptake and perceptions of teaching practitioners.
Phase Five: devise a set of guidelines for ODL
practitioners in using, repurposing and adopting
OERs in a disciplinary context. Practitioners‟
involvement.

14.  What is your immediate reaction to the resource
(in terms of accessibility, layout, intuitiveness,
coherence as a package)
◦ Is the resource specific and practical?
◦ Reusability: can the resource be adapted to
suit others needs?
◦ Is the resource accessible and structured
logically?
 How might you use this resource in your
teaching?
◦ Would you adapt it or use it as it is?
◦ What issues can you foresee if you used this
resource?
◦ What advantages for using this resource, as
opposed to creating your own material?
http://delilaopen.wordpress.com

15.  Workshops: most practitioners not familiar
with OER: strong academic development
aspect of workshops.
 Reusabilty/repurposing focus of workshops:
preference for „useful, specific and practical
OERs‟.
 Survey: “Context often missing”, preference
for reusable rather than repurposable.
 Survey, main potential benefit of OERs:
„improved learning‟ and less „saving on
academic time to develop appropriate
material/content‟.
Evaluation

16. Major weakness of OERs as often transmissive „teaching entities‟:
how do we reverse this?
Designing OERs to be used by any learner require different design
approaches.
MOOCs as a new OER design paradigm?
Shift in focus away from the resources themselves towards open
educational practices (OEP).
„The vision of OEP includes a move from a resource based learning
and outcomes based assessment, to a learning process in which
social processes, validation and reflection are at the heart of
education, and learners become experts in judging, reflection,
innovation within a domain and navigation through domain
knowledge‟ (OPAL, 2010, p. 46).
OERs: some reflections

17. http://keats.kcl.ac.uk/
Thank you
For comments or questions
email Stylianos
at
s.hatzipanagos@kcl.ac.uk