JISC

Overview

The Open, Transferable and Technology-enabled Educational Resources (OTTER) project at the University of Leicester will enable, pilot and evaluate systems and processes designed to enable individuals, teams and departments to release high quality open educational resources (OERs) for free access, reuse and repurposing by others, in perpetuity. OTTER will contribute a body of high quality OERs from 8 departments at Leicester, and plan to encourage and support many others. Equivalent to 360 credits, these OERs will be free to access online, use, adapt and repurpose under an appropriate open licence, and will be valuable to academics, past, current and future learners, funding agencies and professional organisations in the relevant fields worldwide. OTTER will make extensive use of learning technologies and maximise the affordances of the JorumOpen platform and Leicester’s institutional open source platform, Plone. OTTER will inform institutional and sector policy on the release of existing digital content as OERs. OTTER’s deliverables and benefits will be disseminated widely across the institution, the sector and internationally well beyond the project’s life.

Aims and objectives

The primary aim of OTTER is to pilot, analyse and model effective processes for the successful release of highly usable, adaptable, technology-enabled OERs at UoL. OTTER will provide evidence for the sustainable release of future OERs at UoL and across the sector through the adaptation, integration and transfer of lessons learned from other relevant projects (e.g. CASPER, MERLOT, RepRODUCE, Web2Rights) and well-documented and researched experiences in OERs (including MIT’s Open Courseware, Rice University’s Connexions and the OU’s OpenLearn project). Specifically, OTTER will:

1. Contribute, through effective models for OER release, towards the marketing and positioning of the UoL and the UK HE sector among prospective students globally (Box 1).
2. Modernise, update, tag, categorise and release 360 credits’ worth of digital materials from 6 academic departments, from Staff Development and from Student Support Services for open use and repurposing.
3. Integrate lessons learned from previous OER experiences to identify the key challenges associated with the clearance of rights, licensing and release of existing resources for free open access and repurposing.
4. Support individuals, teams and departments to release their digital content for free use and repurposing.
5. Promote the sharing and reuse of high quality OERs within UoL and across the sector.
6. Populate, test the affordances and inform future versions of JorumOpen and UoL’s open repository.
7. Build capacity and provide evidence, in usable formats, to influence future institutional and cross-sector policy in respect of OERs at UoL and elsewhere.
8. Widely disseminate OTTER’s outcomes locally, nationally and globally, well beyond the duration of the project, through UoL’s high-profile presence at international conferences, communities of practice, publications and via Plone, UoL’s institutional OER repository

Project methodology

OTTER has selected eight project partners (see list below) representing different disciplines in the University of Leicester. These project partners, and the Beyond Distance Research Alliance (BDRA) itself, all have existing materials that can readily be converted into OERs.
The OTTER project team will take the following measures in processing the materials:

1. Identifying and resolving IPR issues such as 3rd party rights
2. Identifying the most suitable licence, depending on discipline, context and type of OER, ensuring that reuse and repurposing are permitted
3. Reformatting the materials in a suitable and consistent format for the platforms (JORUM Open and the University of Leicester’s PLONE site)
4. In collaboration with the contributing partners, producing usable documentation for reuse, repurposing and transferability of OERs
5. Tagging, publishing and linking the OERs within the agreed digital platforms
6. Evaluating usability – staff and student feedback will drive iterative improvements to the usability of the OERs throughout the project’s lifecycle.

OTTER will evaluate and model the above processes with a view to transferring them to other departments at UoL and the broader global community.

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

1. A structured and coherent collection of high quality, up-to-date OERs equivalent to at least 360 credits and in appropriate formats, with their relevant metadata, from 8 UoL departments, openly available through appropriate channels for free use and repurposing, under an open licence and in perpetuity. The OERs originate from traditional disciplines as well as from BDRA (research to practice in learning technology), Staff Development and Student Support Services.
2. A sustainable model for the release of existing learning materials as OERs at team, departmental and institutional levels. UoL will be used as a case study and example including the wide range of institutional processes involved, internal partnerships and implementation through UoL’s new Learning Innovation Strategy (likely to be accepted by the UoL Senate in July 2009).
3. Piloted processes to provide evidence for institutional policy changes and support for the release of open resources, with usable documentation for transferability.
4. A set of standards, processes and policies to support the continuation and extend the volume and quality of the release and dissemination of OERs by teams, departments and the university.
5. Evidence of use of the OTTER OERs, including user cases with feedback.
6. Guidance, documentation and check lists to support the release of future OERs.
7. A comprehensive OTTER interactive website.
8. Reports to the funders.
9. A minimum of two academic papers for submission to refereed journals and four conference papers presented within 18 months of the start of the project.
10. Three OER awareness-raising events involving UoL staff and students.
11. An end-of-project OER symposium, in coordination with JISC and the HE Academy

Technology / Standards used

1. JorumOpen.
2. A dedicated area on UoL’s Plone open source system (http://www2.le.ac.uk/), which offers a set of tools for cataloguing, tagging and syndication through RSS feeds.
3. HE Academy Subject Centres’ digital repositories.
4. Publicly available and accessible collections of resources, such as (but not restricted to) YouTube channels (including UoL’s own channel), SlideShare and Flickr.
5. Second Life. Materials will be released as OERs on BDRA’s well-established Second Life Island and will be linked using the appropriate SLURLs.
6. The HE Academy is currently piloting 'EvidenceNet', which will provide an evidence-based approach to informing learning and teaching. Appropriate OTTER resources will also be offered to EvidenceNet.

Lead Institution

Project partners

1. Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester
2. School of Education, University of Leicester
3. School of Law, University of Leicester
4. Department of Politics & International Relations, University of Leicester
5. Department of Psychology, University of Leicester
6. Staff Development Service, University of Leicester
7. Student Support and Development Service, University of Leicester