OER1027 Oral Presentation ppt

Skills for Scientists: creating and supporting a sustainable OER environment

Tracey Madden, Higher Education Academy Physical Sciences Centre

Conference Theme: Open Educational Content

Abstract: The Skills for Scientists project took a number of practitioners with pre-existing teaching resources from across the physical sciences disciplines and supported them through the process of making those materials available as open educational resources. Our aim was that those practitioners would be enabled to continue to engage with the OER culture, forming a community of practice and act as inspiration and support to their peers, and we as a Centre would take our experiences and use them to support the rest of our discipline community and beyond. We will show how those involved in this project met the many challenges in producing open content including addressing the accessibility both of their resources and the tools for sharing; understanding the role of metadata and how to incorporate it into resources; understanding IPR in the context of OER including the use of third-party content, and selecting suitable open licenses through understanding the implications of their use. We will also illustrate how the project made use of existing repositories, institutional and others such as JorumOpen, and Web 2.0 services for the storage and sharing of OER and contrast their effectiveness, ease of use and potential for measuring uptake and impact. Above all, we will demonstrate how we structured the process specifically in order to make it sustainable and showcase the resources we produced in the course of the project to enable others to benefit from the lessons learned in all practical matters of producing OER.

Keywords: OER, physical science, chemistry, physics, forensic science, ukoer, skills for scientists, physical sciences centre, sustainability, repositories, web 2.0, IPR