Open learning anyone?

Copyright cleared Recycle image sourced from FlickrCC

I just stumbled across the call to bid for the OER programme > Please read on.

If you would like to know what others have done in the past to create "open resources", then please browse through the high quality resources (entire courses) created by a consortia of top USA Universities. Theirs are called"Open Courseware." Or more recently in the UK the OU also decided to give away their resources in the shape of "Open Learn." This approach has been discussed in great depth in the last two years. The OU even encourage you to download their course materials and repurpose them using their Lab. Also a couple of wiki sites also discuss the terminology Open content and offer resources to reuse.

This is in part a response to one of those DIUS 9 strands to improve UK HE to compete in an ever shrinking global market. But what I find slightly sad is that the general consensus of opinion seems to concur that to improve our (HE) standing globally, all we need to do is to produce top quality resources? What about altering the pedagogy first, to exploit new ways of communicating & learning?



Bidding for the Open Educational Resources (OER) programme is now open.


In partnership with the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), we (HEA) will be running a pilot programme to support the release of existing educational resources. The goal of the programme is to make a wide range of learning resources freely available and easily discoverable so that they may be routinely re-used by both educators and learners. There will be three separate project strands to the pilot programme:

• Institutional: resources released across an entire institution

(Total funding of £1.50 million available, up to £250,000 per project)

• Individual: resources released by individual academic staff

(Total funding of £200,000 available, up to £20,000 per project)

• Subject: resources released by departments, faculties and schools within a variety of institutions, supported by Academy Subject Centres and Professional Bodies or subject associations

(Total funding of £3 million available, up to £250,000 per project)


A community briefing event will be held on 26 January 2009 at Aston University in Birmingham, which will enable potential bidders to find out more about the funding opportunities associated with this call.

The deadline for proposals in response to this call is 12:00 noon on 4 March 2009.

For further information and the bidding documentation, please visit the following link: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/ourwork/learning/opencontent.