Creating, Doing, and Sustaining OER: Lessons from Six Open Educational Resource Projects

Project Start Date: 
2006

A wide range of individuals and organizations are actively involved in the development of free-to-use open educational resources (OER). Because the field is so new, there have been few opportunities to share learnings and advances across projects and boundaries. Little is known, for example, about how projects are facilitating the adaptation of open content by diverse users, what structures they are instilling to support peer production, and how they are attempting to inspire community engagement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our Role: 

ISKME has worked with six projects to help them build capacity to track, analyze and share key developments in open educational resources (OER), and in the practices and models that play a role in project sustainability. The aim was to enable projects to discover unknown or untapped potential, to facilitate decision making around which practices to change or maintain, and to learn how other OER projects have overcome similar challenges. In addition, the exploration of these six projects sought to advance the field at large by contributing new knowledge on which others can build.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


The participating OER projects include:
* CurriculumNet (Uganda) 
Curriki (United States)
Free High School Science Texts (South Africa)
Mission 2007 Training Commons (India)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (United States)
Teachers' Domain (United States)

Research Questions: 
  • What factors enable and support the adoption and use of open educational resources by teachers and learners?
  • What role does community play in the creation, use, and reuse of content? 
  • What processes and structures best facilitate the collaborative authorship of resources?
  • How can OER projects ensure that content remains continually relevant, usable and adaptable to local contexts?
  • What factors contribute to a resource’s ability to “travel well,” i.e. to be more easily reusable in a context different from that which it may have been originally intended?
Service Areas: