What's the SCORE?

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.

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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