Today I’m at the Beyond Borders event in Oxford, in the very nicely equipped Said Business School. After a welcome from Melissa Highton, first up is Andy Lane talking about ‘OpenLearn‘ at the Open University.

Andy first asks ‘why make educational resources open’? There was a growing momentum behind OER worldwide (led by MIT) and the emergence of creative commons licenses made it possible to clearly state how materials could be used/reused. The idea of Open Educational Resources fitted well with the OU’s committment to social justice and widening participation – as well as the opportunity to build markets and reputation.

It was hoped that OERs might bridge the divide between formal and informal learning. It costs a lot to create good content – so any opportunity to reuse content and allow more time to be spent in areas where more value could be added – e.g. personal support.

Openlearn is in the process of moving to more ‘short form’ content – bringing in content previously hosted on open2.net. This short form content might be delivered via a number of routes – YouTube, iTunes, etc. At the same time there will be long form content for both learners (in the ‘Learning Space‘) and for educators (‘LabSpace‘). This will be complimented by OLNet – focused on Researchers.

LearningSpace (long form content) is delivered using the Moodle VLE. Not just a way of delivering open resources, but also somewhere that some experimentation can take place in terms of content format, content creation tools, delivery methods etc – some of which will feedback into the OU’s core VLE product.

OU believes this approach helps bridge informal and formal learning – the learner comes first, content is the hook, and delivers flexibility with a mix and match approach and self pacing. Only about 126,000 people registered – many fewer than the number of people who are browsing the site.

It is a huge challenge to understand how people are using the material. Example of Daniel Conn from the Times. On Open Learn seeing both ‘volunteer students’ and ‘social learners’.

Andy now talking about LabSpace – examples of teachers collaborating on aspects of creating educational resources – e.g.:

• Preparation
• Curriculum extension
• Professional development
• Share materials
• …

Example of pushing learning content into a WordPress Blog (example of course on Hume – more information on how this was done at http://jimgroom.umwblogs.org/2008/02/17/proud-spammer-of-open-university-courses/, and thoughts from Tony Hirst at http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/blogarchive/013251.html)

Q & A:

Q: What kind of pressure is there to show link between publishing OERs and showing it brings in students to the Open University. What evidence is there?

A: Yes – those questions have been asked. It was an institutional action research project with buy-in from the top and external funding. Benefits not just in terms of how many students come in through this process – but many other aspects – use in Widening participation strategy – a way of dealing with hard to reach groups and bringing them in; being used by marketing department; being used as part of student registration process; used to work with regional funding bodies (in Scotland and Wales). Andy stresses all aspects need to be considered when looking at benefits