OER Development and Promotion. Outcomes of an International Research Project on the OpenCourseWare Model

In this paper, we describe the successful results of an international research project focused on the use of Web technology in the educational context. The article explains how this international project, funded by public organizations and developed over the last two academic years, focuses on the area of open educational resources (OER) and particularly the educational content of the OpenCourseWare (OCW) model. This initiative has been developed by a research group composed of researchers from three countries. The project was enabled by the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid OCW Office�s leadership of the Consortium of Latin American Universities and the distance education know-how of the Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja (UTPL, Ecuador). We give a full account of the project, methodology, main outcomes and validation. The project results have further consolidated the group, and increased the maturity of group members and networking with other groups in the area. The group is now participating in other research projects that continue the lines developed her

Exposure and Support of Latent Social Networks among Learning Object Repository Users

Although immense efforts have been invested in the construction of hundreds of learning object repositories, the degree of reuse of learning resources maintained in such repositories is still disappointingly low. As the reasons for this observation are not well understood, we carried out an empirical investigation with the objectives to identify recurring patterns in the retrieval and (re-) use of learning resources and to design and test social networking functionality supporting communities of practice. The outcomes of this project, which are reported here, aim to affect the design of a new generation of learning object repositories, like CampusContent, that tries to eliminate deficits of current repositories and involve recent contributions in the area of social software. Object of our investigation was LON-CAPA, a crossinstitutional learning content management and assessment system used since 2000. We analyzed hundreds of thousands of log data collected over a period of three years and detected various kinds of latent relationships among LON-CAPA users, such as the co-occurrence of learning resources from independent authors in instructional materials. To understand the rationale behind these findings, we conducted a study with LON-CAPA users. One section of the questionnaire asked for people's opinion about the expected benefit of community support. Nearly 80% of the study participants said that the formation of communities of practice (CoP) would be an asset to LON-CAPA. More than 80% would be ready to provide their profiles for matching up with CoPs and serve the community by spending time on the evaluation of resources they had used. Finally we sketch a faceted search functionality we designed to support CoPs among LON-CAPA users. This functionality is currently tested with two CoPs

Enhancing curriculum design and delivery with OER

This paper reports on the key findings from the EVOL-OER project which aims to develop a deeper understanding of the reuse of open educational resources (OERs) by academics in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). This paper builds on the JISC OER Impact study by exploring and expanding on the Ratified quadrant of the study’s landscape of reuse framework (White & Manton, 2011). This paper puts forward a different four-quadrant diagram called ‘OER-enhanced curriculum’ to illustrate different approaches adopted by academics to embedding OER into curriculum design and delivery. Key issues in relation to motivation and challenges in reusing OER are discussed