Diffusion of innovation through formal institutional networks

This paper reviews and reflects on institutional OER development practices along the dimensions and models of collaboration and innovation within communities and networks of practice, and provides insights as how to improve the diffusion of OER through institutional networks. It does so by examining two cases: Case 1 MORIL: The EADTU has been working on sharing and developing institutional OER strategies by means of a taskforce on Multilingual Open Resources for Independent Learning (MORIL). The US-based William and Flora Hewlett Foundation acted as a financial catalyst to initiate a Network of Practice within the participating institutions and which is being extended through a grant from the Erasmus Lifelong Learning Programme in the strand Virtual Campus. Case 2 TESSA: The Teacher Education in Sub Saharan Africa (TESSA) programme is a research and development initiative creating OER and course design guidance for teachers and teacher educators working in Sub-Saharan African countries. TESSA is a consortium of 18 national and international organisations including 13 institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa who are using the TESSA materials in a variety of teacher education programmes. The major funding for TESSA has come from the Allan and Nesta Ferguson Charitable Trust and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

Open educational resources in Europe: A triptych of actions to support participation in higher education

In contrast to the face-to-face learning of campus based universities and the focus on traditional students, distance teaching universities focus on a mix of distance learning, e-learning, open learning, virtual mobility, learning communities, and the integration of earning and learning. In doing so, they are taking a leading role in helping to increase and widen participation in lifelong open and flexible learning in higher education by non-traditional groups. This paper discusses three leading-edge European Open Educational Resource initiatives. The initiatives are special in nature and differ from the offers of traditional universities in the sense that they: consist of pedagogically-rich learning materials, specifically designed and developed for distance learning and intended for independent self-study; are compiled in the national languages, with the EADTU initiative being multilingual, reflecting the European dimension; and, support and are supported by the policies of the national governments and the European Commission

The challenge of widening citizen participation in climate change education: developing open educational resources on the lived experiences of climate change

If climate change education is to become more than self-serving and contribute to meeting the global challenge of sustainable development, it must broaden its scope to include a wider range of students in terms of age, social group and ethnicity than is usually the case. In this paper the authors discuss how open and flexible learning can apply its strengths in the area of widening participation, as it can lever years of experience with non-traditional target groups. They show how flexible learning universities, such as Open Universities, may offer their curriculum as open educational resource (OER) for these types of learning and can indeed contribute for achieving such a needed critical mass. Mass education of this type may have a key role to play in meeting any global challenge, and climate change is no exception. In this paper, the authors exemplify it through an exploration of a partnership project between eight European universities in developing the LECH-e materials for a Master’s curriculum on the lived experiences of climate change.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The lived experience of sustainable learning: the LECH-e OER Project bridging formal and non formal lifelong learners

The Erasmus-funded Lived experience of climate change: e-learning and virtual mobility (LECH-e) project is developing learning resources on the topic of climate change that will be openly accessible on the web for higher education institutions and the wider world public to use and adapt. Institutions are free to integrate the resources into their formal programs and non-formal courses. A description of the project is provided in a short prologue. In this paper we depict the open learning strategy implemented by the LECH-e partnership and how it can contribute to widening participation in environmental, and specifically climate change, education

Show off the corporate library

Some published evidence has suggested that corporate libraries are slowly becoming irrelevant in meeting organisational information needs due to old-fashioned models of service delivery. Elsewhere in the literature the intranet is heralded as a technological tool for corporate information management. This paper provides the results of a series of case studies completed in 1998. The purpose of the research was to investigate: (a) whether corporate libraries could be considered as heading towards demise; (b) the extent to which corporate librarians might use intranets to provide information services to their clients; (c) the level of library involvement in the planning, implementation and running of corporate intranets; (d) the perceived impact of intranet development on libraries' profiles within their parent organisations. The data were collected from library staff in eight corporate headquarters of organisations based in California, USA by observation, interview and e-mail. The results suggest that the case study libraries are heavily integrated with the corporate intranet and that the library staff are actively involved in taking the best advantage of this technology to deliver information services to meet increasing customer demands

Open Educational Resources in a Muli-Campus and Virtual Campus Environment

In this paper we explore the reasons for which both traditional universities as well as Open universities could adopt OER to enhance their networked curricula in a typical regional multi-campus or virtual campus scenario. We will highlight the very different institutional goals that can be achieved by the implementation of OER, and show that OER are compatible with a variety of pedagogical approaches. On the other hand, we will stress that OER need to be understood in a more comprehensive way than the course content as such, and should include open communication about the educational concepts and curricular aims in which they operate, as well as being embedded in the regional stakeholder and expertise networks that sustain the knowledge domain covered. The research is done in the context of the project Innovative Open Educational Resources (OER) in European higher education (OER-HE) lead by the European Association of Distance Universities (EADTU), and involves (for the work on multi-campus) K.U.Leuven, which is a traditional university, the Open Universiteit in The Netherlands (OUNL), which is in the process of starting up the Networked Open Polytechnic, and the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). Besides the more theoretical reflection and literature study, the methodology of this research focuses on qualitative methods, involving interviews with key decision makers in the adoption of OER and open policies at institutions of different types, and stakeholder workshops to validate the chosen approaches. By having access to internal documents we can shed a light in the different arguments and motives that are taken into account when considering OER. The following possible motives for the use of OER are evaluated: widening participation and lifelong learning, internationalization, exposure, mainstreaming, reaching out to stakeholders, quality control, cost efficiency, supporting learning in the digital age, facilitating interdisciplinary research. These are ranked in function of the different institutional profiles. This first line of research should allow us to do more focused quantitative inquires in the future. OER in these contexts are meant to help fill the local expertise gaps and are part of an effort to create an integrated learning environment that is both virtual and physical, mixing distant and blended learning. Each institution is trying to shape future learning environments out of starting conditions that are historically evolved. In each case, the relation between content, human resources and knowledge dissemination is explored and an argumentation is construed to strengthen OER policies at the strategic institutional level, by connecting it to the respective business models. The three partners involved in this research look into OER from very different backgrounds and goals. Whereas for UOC multi-campus means a virtual campus, and ODL technologies are at the core of using OER, the OUNL is involved in a project to setup a Network Open Polytechnics (NOP), aiming to share innovative course content to existing Higher Education institutions. For K.U.Leuven, OER technologies help to overcome logistical and synergy problems stemming from its University Association, involving 13 institutions in multiple campuses throughout the Flemish Region.status: publishe

Naar een ontspannen Nederland : hoe het oplossen van de stikstofproblematiek via een ruimtelijke benadering een hefboom kan zijn voor het aanpakken van andere grote opgaven en zo een nieuw perspectief kan opleveren voor het landelijk gebied

In dit perspectief ‘Ontspannen Nederland’ laten wij zien dat we met een slimme oplossing voor de stikstofcrisis ook vele andere ambities kunnen realiseren. Wij hebben alle (inter)nationale verplichtingen en afspraken op een rij gezet en die hebben grote gevolgen voor de keuzes die we maken in het landelijk gebied en de rol voor de landbouw daarbinnen. Door met een brede, ruimtelijke blik naar de stikstofopgave te kijken en na te denken over integrale langetermijnoplossingen, kunnen we een maximaal maatschappelijk rendement krijgen op de forse overheidsinvesteringen die hoe dan ook hiervoor moeten worden gedaan. Van groot belang daarbij is het benutten van synergiekansen en het verbinden van de korte en lange termijn

MultiCampus Open Educational Resources : the case of OER-HE

In this paper we address the implementation strategies regarding Open Educational Resources within a multicampus setting. A comparison is made between 3 institutions that are taking a very different approach: K.U.Leuven, which is a traditional university, the Open Universiteit (Netherlands) which is in the process of starting up the Network Open Polytechnics, and the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. We are looking deeper into the pedagogical and organizational issues involved in implementing an OER strategy and show how OER holds the promise of flexible solutions for reaching at first sight very divergent goals