Transcript

PRESENTER:

But it still comes back to saying that Open Education Resources are what people make of them. There are different people who want to use Open Education Resources for different purposes. It's not straight forward. And you can never be sure, once you've got it out there open, who might pick it up and use it.

In very interesting, novel ways. All sorts of work-based learning, continuing professional development, in-house training within companies. Because it’s there. Because people value it. Then some of it can be used and incorporated and done in all sorts of different settings. You might not have thought it would happen before it become openly available.

So they can be designed specifically for educational use. But, as Jonathan said, there can be other content use for educational purposes, or it could be just purely used as an information source. A thing that has been said, the Open Learn, the OU, has had over 20 million visitors in the five and a half years it’s been running. So it’s 20 million unique visitors from more than 200 countries and territories.

I don’t know if there is a country or territory around the world which we haven’t had somebody accessing it from. That’s an awful lot of people but, as with any website like this, we have a high bounce rate. People come in, what am I doing here? Go off again, because they’re searching.

Because so many people are saying I want to get some information on – they’ll say, oh, the philosopher Hume. [MAKES TYPING SOUNDS] And up comes the top of the Google rankings, comes something on Open Learn. Just because we happen to have something on Hume. And they go there and look at that, and they say oh, no, that doesn’t help me.

I don’t want that, I wanted something else. So you’re still getting a lot of people coming. It’s also the case, it’s about thinking about it. But if you’ve got your own institutional website, or your own website with resources in it, you’ve also got to be thinking about who might be coming there, how they’re doing it, will anybody notice your actual repository? There are lots of them out there. There are lots of websites out there.

Why are they going to come to yours? That’s another issue. So it’s also, you do have to think about who do you think is a primary audience for the things that you do? Aren’t you doing this mainly inwardly for your own students? In which case, why does it matter if it’s open? Or are you doing this because you think, oh, this could be good for potential students?

Or we’re doing this because it could be because we’re doing work-based learning. We’ve got these industrial partners, and we want them to be able to access this easily, accessing the internet in our own platform is difficult, and difficult to arrange. And it just makes some ways of teaching and learning much easier.

Practice, particularly sort of practice-based areas, professions, the health service. If a nurse can access it immediately on the ward, rather than having to do it through other particular mechanisms, is that better? They can openly get to it by whatever means. Don’t have any specific log-ins or whatever. There are pros and cons with all of that, but you have to think about it.