6 Tools for creating an OER

In planning your learning resource, you need to keep four questions in mind.

1. What are you trying to achieve with this teaching course – what are your aims?
2. What activities do you wish the learners to engage with in order to demonstrate or achieve those aims – what are the learning objectives or outcomes, and how are they to be assessed?
3. How will you evaluate the effectiveness of what you have produced?
4. In the light of the evaluation, how will you change 1 and 2 above?

When you meet your learners face-to-face, it is relatively straight forward to answer question 3. Even before an assignment is marked or any informal question is answered, the learner’s body language gives plenty of feedback as to the success of your activities. In producing OERs you don't have such quick feedback, although some research into the The Open University’s OERs has taken place.

Watch the video below for a brief introduction to creating an OER.

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Transcript: Creating an OER

PRESENTER:

Well, hello everyone. As [? Trist ?] was saying, I'm from the University of Nottingham. And I'm one of the SCORE Fellows here, just started actually. So, it's really nice to be here working with you all today. I guess you've had a busy week so far. Today is very much about you working on your own OER projects, and hopefully you got the message, at the beginning of the course, to bring some materials and some ideas for things that you want to work on.

So today, as I say, a lot of it is going to be about you working and I'll give you as much help as I can. I have to say, I don't profess to be an expert in OER, and I don't think there is such a thing as an expert in OER. I remember when I first started working in e-learning, and an e-learning professor said to me, don't let anyone ever tell you they're an expert in e-learning because there's not such a thing.

I think that's very much true of OER. Everyone's finding their way in the field. So, just a little bit about me. I come from the University of Nottingham. I work in the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Physiotherapy. So we're quite a large school. We have a very diverse student population, a lot of non-traditional students, I guess, in terms of intake into the School, a lot of mature students, a lot of vocational students.

And, in some ways, the reasons that we've got involved in e-learning and increasing the OER is to meet the needs of those particular students. I'm obviously working with SCORE now. The group ... we are quite fortunate in having quite a large e-learning course in the school, known as HELM – Healthy Learning and Media. So currently, we have about five developers working with us, and we're a team of about nine.

And for the last five years, I've been working on one of the [? Settle ?] projects. I'm not sure if you're aware of the [? Settle ?] projects. These were projects that were funded by HEFCE to the tune of [GBP]340 million – although we didn't have [GBP]340 million – to look at trying to improve the quality of learning and teaching in higher education.

So, I suppose in some ways we were developing – as I'll talk about in a bit – we were developing resources. We didn't call them open educational resources at the time, but that's what they were. And I'll tell you about some of our experiences of using and developing resources to release as OER.

End transcript: Creating an OER

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Creating an OER