Higher Education Academy Engineering Subject Centre

Project Overview

Open Educational Resources are defined as 'teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property licence that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open Educational Resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials or techniques used to support access to knowledge'. Definition used by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Specifically, this project made available teaching materials currently in use as Open Educational Resources (OER) under open licensing agreements.  The Engineering Subject Centre worked in partnership with a range of higher education (HE) engineering departments and professional bodies to release their materials in this way.  The project captured the technical, logistical and legal processes undertaken in both traditional and innovative ways to build expertise and provide guidance for future developments.  A comprehensive guide was produced in association with other STEM Subject Centres to provide help and advice to those considering OER for the first time- see http://stemoer.pbworks.com/ for details.

The Engineering Subject Centre used its well established networks and strong links with the professional bodies to ensure the project had the maximum impact. The project established and evaluated a processes for the release of OER to form a basis for embedding this work within the Subject Centre’s future plans and to develop the practice elsewhere.  All OER released by the partners were given the highest possible profile by employing the latest “web 2.0” services such as YouTube, Delicious, Flickr etc., and standards-compliant packaging methods to maximise easy reuse via the Jorum repository.

Partners on this project included HE institutions as well as further education (FE) institutions teaching at HE level in order to capture material encapsulating a broad range of teaching styles, educational settings and levels and including resources for learners in the workplace.

Project Manager: Rob Pearce, Information Systems and E-learning Manager. rob@engsc.ac.uk

Project Officer: Alex Fenlon, alex@engsc.ac.uk