Higher Education Academy Engineering Subject Centre

As a part of the HEFCE funded, JISC/HEA managed UKOER programme we have been involved with and led several projects to release Open Educational Resources (OER).  OER are materials that are avaliable under open licences such as Creative commons, and can be used in teaching and learning activities.  OER can be simple text based materials, images and diagrams, or they could be an interactive website, essentailly anything at all.  For more info about OER see the OER FAQ.

There have been numerous OER projects resulting in high quality teaching materials and supporting resources from numerous UK academics being made available under 'open' licensing agreements.  These licences allow the re-use of those materials by students and academics but alos permit the edit of those resources to suit the context of a particular course or institution.  The re-purposing encourages the development of derivative works to evolve the teaching materials themselves and ultimately the subject.

The Engineering Subject Centre has:

1. Led a successful pilot programme involve 7 different UK HEI's (2009 - 2010) which released 360 credits-worth of Open Educational Resources specifically relating to Engineering.  Details of the Open Engineering Resources Pilot Project can be found here.  The resources released cover subjects such are electrical, mechanical, aero and design engineeering.  The project used an advanced approach relying on web2.0 services to hold the resources.  A search tool which surfaces these resources from the various hosting sites was develop to display the resources in a central portal- see below. 
2. Created numerous guidance documents for the communtiy so that others can start to engage with the OER Movement.  One example of such a document would be the OER FAQ.
3. Combined with other STEM Subject Centres to produce the STEM OER Guide wiki which is an evolving resource for the wider STEM Community and is itself an OER- see http://stemoer.pbworks.com/.
4. Received funding under the UKOER Phase 2 call for a one-year project (Aug. 2010-Aug. 2011) to create a linked, self sustaining, dymanic collection of OER relating to low-carbon engineering.   The project will involve the selection of materials by experts in the fields to create a fresh, dynamic source of current and new materials as they become available.  The project will use web technologies to search the internet to surface these sources as and when they are released (the dynamic collection), but will also include a number of resources reviuewed and critiqued by the community to ensure quality and provenacne of the resources discovered (the static collection).  The project also includes a selection of 'best of breed' resources which are not OER so that a comparsion can be made between what is used by experts as the best resources to aid their teaching and what is available as OER.  For full details see the project page here.
5. Been a partner on 3 other Phase 2 projects providing expertise and guidance on all matters relating to OER specifically the processes involved.  The projects are: 2012 Learning Legacies from the HLST Subject Centre, Open 4 Business from the BMAF Subject Centre, IPR4EE from University College Falmouth.  The Centre is also on the advisory board for the OSIER Project from University of Bath.  These projects do not cover engineering specificially but include the release of CPD and professional development resources relevant to the engineering community.

As a result of the Centre's involvement with OER, we have begun investigating the possibility of releasing all Centre outputs as Open Access Resources (OAR) under Creative Commons licences. The Centre is currently looking at the viability of converting its key outputs over the last 10 years of operation into OAR to facilitate re-use going forward.