So for a while now I have been
meaning to write a post about a project I was involved in about 4 years ago
that enabled me to be actively involved in a field I had long held beliefs in
but not been able to make what I felt were significant steps to fully understanding
or realising change. Thanks to Marieke Guy (Open Education Working Group,
coordinator http://education.okfn.org/) and Alannah Fitzgerald’s (SCORE fellow) timely email it has given
me that nudge to write maybe the first part of a series of posts along the
lines of “What did OER do for me?” and “SCORE, what happened next”. This first
one is a brief history and achievements of the project to set the scene.
SCORE (Support Centre for Open
Resources in Education) was a three year project funded by HEFCE operating from
2009-2012 and based at the Open University (UK).
Running alongside the UKOER
programme it was part of the OU national role to support individuals, projects,
institutions and programmes across the higher education sector in England to
engage with open educational resources (OER) and practices.
In support of this SCORE worked
in a number of ways:
- Increased the amount of quality OER available through creation of new OER deposited in the OU ‘Labspace’ (now known as OpenLearn Works) and JORUM.
- Worked as an advisory service to the HE sector
- Ran events to support dissemination of research as well as a variety of workshops ranging from licensing to ‘Introduction to OER’
For me two of the more significant
activities were:
SCORE Fellowship
SCORE funded 30 fellowships from across HE institutions in England who’s
projects aimed to inform, influence and impact on OER policy and practice
across the sector. These fellows were
the heart of the project getting involved in multiple events both inside and
outside of the project advocating for and supporting OER work in their
institutions and more widely. Fellows supported workshops and events through
presentation and teaching and in the creation of new OER. In one example I
worked with fellows from The Universities of Leicester, Nottingham and Manchester
to create 2 open websites with curated OER http://readytoresearch.ac.uk/
http://digitalscholarship.ac.uk/
the breadth of work and commitment of the fellows still astounds me and
hopefully you will be able to read more about their work and what happened next
in further posts.
Short term Fellowship
If the fellows were the heart of SCORE then the short term fellows were
the blood flowing through reaching further and deeper into areas of HE. In my
time at SCORE we ran a number of week long residential courses impacting on around
50 individuals from multiple institutions. These were designed to introduce
those in HE to OER with the creation of projects (OER) that would impact on their
institutions policies and uptake of OER through the development of their own
practice. Although only funded to support English institutions we did have a
number of international fellows as well increasing the diversity of the impact.
What else?
SCORE also
ran the OER conferences and for OER12 in Cambridge did this in conjunction with
the Open Education Consortiums (formally the Open Courseware Consortium) global
meeting making it the first large scale international OER conference in the UK.
As part of the conference we supported the Paris Declaration consultation in
the only tier 1 country. The ALT Open Education special interest group https://www.alt.ac.uk/get-involved/special-interest-groups/oer-sig
was conceived and supported in collaboration with SCORE fellows gathering
interest with the launch of the Open Education Statement of Commitment
“I will,
whenever possible, release the educational content I produce under an open
licence and whenever I am looking for resources for education I will endeavour
to seek out content with an open licence.”
This post has only touches on some of the work of the
project hopefully you will be able to read some more personal accounts of the
fellows and others working on the project over the next couple of months but
for further information have a look at the UKOER/SCORE Review report – ‘Journeys
to Open Educational Practice’ https://oersynth.pbworks.com/w/page/60338879/HEFCE-OER-Review-Final-Report
And as with
all things open please feel free to adapt this post, get the facts right, make
it work for you and add your voice.
CC-BY-SA
N.B.
If you are interested in joining the Open Knowledge Foundation Open education group mailing list http://education.okfn.org/mailing-list/
You can find more information on the next OER conference in April 'OER15' here http://oer15.oerconf.org/ might get a chance to chat to some of the SCORE fellows
N.B.
If you are interested in joining the Open Knowledge Foundation Open education group mailing list http://education.okfn.org/mailing-list/
You can find more information on the next OER conference in April 'OER15' here http://oer15.oerconf.org/ might get a chance to chat to some of the SCORE fellows