Managed in partnership with the Higher Education Academy, our open educational resources (OER) programme [accessed via the UK Government Web Archive] ran in three phases between 2009 -2012.
A strand of the e-learning programme, our UK open educational resources (UKOER) programme promoted the free sharing and re-use of high-quality learning resources in the UK and worldwide as part of a wider ‘open’ philosophy or movement. Our guide explains more.
The programme built on our earlier work on e-learning resources, X4L in 2002-2006 and ReProduce in 2008-2009. The 65 projects taking part, together with 15 rapid innovation short technical projects, prompted a UK-wide rethink of the way in which learning and teaching materials are created, shared, distributed and used.
A range of stakeholders have benefited including employers, public bodies, institutions, students and staff and resource developers. The UKOER programme also helped establish the use of Creative Commons (CC) licences in education. Try the OER Remix Creative Commons licence quiz to find out how combinations of CC licences can help others make legitimate and effective use of your resources.
A parallel development is Jorum, a repository of OERs for resource discovery and sharing across the UK and world wide, which now forms part of our digital resources directorate. During 2008-2009, our Jorum community bay project [accessed via the UK Web Archive] worked on integrating Jorum with widely used virtual learning environments such as Moodle.
Our open education case studies illustrate some of the benefits from OERs that have been experienced by four universities; see also our 2008 good intentions report which examined the business case for sharing learning materials.
