Successfully Exchanging Methods and Processes between Institutions to Create Open Educational Resources

Higher Education Institutions are encouraged to share their course materials for the benefit of academics and learners worldwide. Open Educational Resources (OER) are one approach to releasing stored learning materials from closed systems into open systems. An expectation of the approach is to find new learners but also to allow two-way exchange of teaching material between educational providers. However, such exchange is not straightforward to achieve. Experience in transforming closed content into open content has identified issues of infrastructure, technical support, pedagogic design, ownership of tasks, and specification of roles. The Open University’s OpenLearn initiative established a site for learners to access OER and has built up methods, processes and procedures for transforming material from existing courses into a suitable form for open use. These materials are available for download; re-purposing and re-upload to the OpenLearn LabSpace. In the first year of operation relatively low numbers of new or changed courses appeared in the LabSpace. As a result, a parallel project, POCKET (Project on Open Content for Knowledge Exposition and Teaching), was tasked with finding ways for the OpenLearn model of production to be transferable to partner universities whilst providing content for open use in the LabSpace. The emphasis in this paper is on how new content has been brought to the OpenLearn LabSpace from other universities as a result of the successful exchange and improvement of methods for working with Open Educational Resources.