“Open Educational Resources — Opportunities and Challenges for Higher Education”

Jane Park — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 18:18:24 +0000

The JISC CETIS (JISC Centre for Educational Technology & Interoperability Standards) is a JISC funded service that has long been researching educational technology and covering the field’s latest developments under a CC BY-NC-SA license. One of their latest publications is a briefing paper on open educational resources (OER) titled, “Open Educational Resources — Opportunities and Challenges for Higher Education” and authored by Li Yuan, Sheila MacNeill, and Wilbert Kraan. According to Li, the briefing paper “[looks] at the latest developments and trends in Open Educational Resources (OER) initiatives worldwide” and serves as “a quick introduction to funding bodies, institutions and educators who are interested in OER initiatives. The paper includes three sections: a) the conceptual and contextual issues of Open Educational Resources; b) current OER initiatives: their scale, approaches, main issues and challenges; and c) trends emerging in Open Educational Resources, with respect to future research and activities.”

He also explains their reasons for initiating and completing the study:
“It appears that OER will have a significant impact on managing and accessing the existing repositories and in taking these initiatives forward as part of a global movement. We thought it might be useful to carry out a review of OERs that might benefit the JISC community in planning funding programs and in opening up discussions on future research directions concerning the use and re-use of digital content.”

The paper can be accessed as a pdf directly from Li’s blog or the JISC CETIS Features page.

Creative Commons » paper

“Open Educational Resources — Opportunities and Challenges for Higher Education”