JISC

Overview

To enhance and expand Nottingham’s existing Open Educational Repository, u-Now, one of the first OERs in the UK and a member of the international Open Courseware Consortium. Through providing guidance and advice, BERLiN will benefit the whole of the UK sector by disseminating our experiences, as well as the outcomes of the project itself which is aimed at exploring the issues raised in the wider take-up and development of an OER. The University of Nottingham is keen to do this because it is part of its culture of sharing and because it is seen as a catalyst for change in the practice of academics from all parts of the University.

Aims and objectives

The aim of the project is to progress the vision of sustainable OERs by making a significant amount of existing learning resources freely available online. As part of an institution-wide strategy for engaging with new technologies in innovative and effective ways, there are a number of features of the teaching and learning landscape at Nottingham that lend themselves to helping deliver this vision for OERs. In addition, Nottingham’s international campuses in China and Malaysia are key strategic drivers for sharing learning resources, fostering use and reuse as well as encouraging mobility.

Project methodology

BERLiN project team will undertake:

• An exploration of the barriers and issues preventing adoption--a key element of this project especially identification of the issues involved and strategies for overcoming them.
• A review of the existing processes and procedures for handling and maintaining the delivered materials will be necessary, particularly adaptation of current practices for deployment on an institutional scale.
• Advocacy, cataloguing, copyright clearance and technical assistance to ensure learning content submission across the five faculties at Nottingham.
• Dissemination of materials through third party repositories (JorumOpen).

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

• A publicly-available report on the review of current OER procedures at Nottingham
• The expansion of the University’s OER (u-Now) to cover content across all five faculties.
• The integration of the u-Now OER with wider distribution mechanisms such as JorumOpen.
• A final project report on outcomes of the BERLiN project including the barriers faced in the wider adoption of OERs across the institution, the issues involved and potential strategies for overcoming them.
• Dissemination to the wider community through a project wiki/blog.
• Other dissemination outputs, including professional publications and conference papers.

Technology/Standards used

• Dublin Core metadata
• SCORM 1.2
• UK LOM
• Equella Learning Object repository
• HTML
• .Net
• RSS