This task was designed to help guide discussions during the second meeting of partners on the C-SAP (Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Sociology, Anthropology and Politics) Open Educational Resources [OER] Phase II project: Cascading Social Science Open Educational Resources. Through the use of reflexive tasks, the project team aims to develop a collaborative framework for cascading OERs within social sciences.

1. Exploring Open Educational Resources
This task was designed to help guide discussions during the second meeting of partners on
the C-SAP (Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Open Educational Resources)
Open Educational Resources Phase II project: Cascading Social Science Open Educational
Resources. Through the use of reflexive tasks, the project team aims to develop a
collaborative framework for cascading OERs within social sciences.
Part 1: Getting to grips with OERs
This task focuses on issues involved in finding and repurposing OERs (searching for OERs,
licensing, tagging etc.). It should help you start feeling more comfortable with the prospect
of eventually creating and sharing your own OERs as part of the cascade process.
In the spirit of OER movement, we decided not to create a new resource from scratch –
instead, we’ve mixed and matched a number of open resources together from The "How
Tos" of OER Commons, a module created by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge
Management in Education (ISKME) and released on Connexions (Rice University OER
repository).
We don’t want to prescribe how you should engage with these resources – depending on
how much time you have and/or what your interests are, you can choose to engage (or not)
in the activities embedded within these modules and follow the attached links. At the very
least, we would like you to look at the material in the OER Glossary as well as the resources
on finding OERs and licensing. Importantly, as you work your way through the resources you
should start thinking in more detail about your own curricula needs; this should also being
to help focus on your own teaching and learning resources you would eventually like to
release as open for this project.
1. Why OER? (http://cnx.org/content/m15211/latest/)
2. OER Glossary (http://cnx.org/content/m15223/latest/
3. Finding OER Materials You Can Start Using Now
(http://cnx.org/content/m15213/latest/)
4. OER Licensing and Conditions of Use (http://cnx.org/content/m15234/latest/)
This content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 UK:
England & Wales http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/ C-SAP, 2010
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2. Task part 1: Your commentary
Finally, once you have familiarised yourself with the resources provided in this task, please
post a short reflexive piece addressing the following questions:
• Look over the comments from the first task: has your understanding of OERs
changed, and if yes, how?
• Has your understanding of the concept of “openness” changed?
Part 2: Searching in OER collections
As we have mentioned, the OER projects are required to deposit their materials into
JORUMOpen, however most people new to OER are not familiar with the repository.
Therefore it would be useful to spend some time searching and browsing, again our
suggestion would be to start with issues outlined in your revised letter of support – for
example, social science research methods is common to most of the partners. As a starting
point it will be useful to simply begin browsing and get a feel for the types of materials and
some of the problems in searching ‘accurately’ for items of relevance. The link again is:
http://www.jorum.ac.uk/
Task part 2: Your commentary
Again, please post a short reflexive piece on this wiki page (using the comments feature)
addressing the following questions:
• how ‘easy’ was it to find materials?
• was browsing or searching more effective?
• would it matter to you were the materials came from (the originator)?
• would you trust (and then re-use) some items over others?
• can you come to any general conclusions about the quality of the material you have
discovered?
• would it be more effective to be able to search or browse according to:
o file types (video / document / audio / pdf etc)
o granularity (single item / multiple item / module / RLO etc)
If you were hypothetically (or in practice) at the point of re-designing a module or refreshing
some of the content, would JORUMOpen be a useful resource or would you look elsewhere?
If you have some more time, using similar search terms, take a look at some alternative
OER collections and search engines, below are some ideas:
MERLOT – www.merlot.org
This content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 UK:
England & Wales http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/ C-SAP, 2010
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3. • OER Recommender - http://www.oerrecommender.org/
• Open CourseWare finder - http://www.ocwfinder.org/
• DiscoverED - http://discovered.creativecommons.org/search/
• Global Learning Objects Brokered Exchange (GLOBE) alliance - http://www.globe-
info.org/
• OER Commons http://www.oercommons.org/oer
Please do post any further comments about discoveries in any of the above collections, or
how they contrast with JORUMOpen – this doesn’t need to be in any detail, but it would be
interesting to know if you felt that any of the other collections were easier to use or that the
range / quality of suitable materials was more extensive. Also bear in mind that US based
collections will most likely use slightly different terminology.
And if you have even more time to spare… feel free to follow the OER-related
conversations (“real” academics discussing the relevance of OERs to their practice!) which
emerged in the context of Open Educational Resources seminar organised by SCOPE
(Community of Practitioners in E-Learning at British Columbia Campus) which took place in
January-February 2009:
1. How do you currently find OERs?
2. What does “open” mean to you?
3. Creating OERs – so… why?
4. Using other people’s work
This content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 UK:
England & Wales http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/ C-SAP, 2010
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