OER Steering Group Meeting – Meeting-6

Friday 4thJune2010, 11:15-12:15

Location : Laver 825

Final Report on Open Exeter

1.0 Introduction

The following is the final report for the JISC-funded project on Open Educational Resources (OER). The project, called ‘Open Exeter’ ran for one year from 1st May 2009 to 30thApril 2010.

This is the 6th(and final) report. By way of preparation, you may also find it useful to peruse the previous progress reports and the subsequent minutes,available from:

This report will focus on the final outputs and any potential follow-up activity.

1.0 Final Outputs

a)The final report, a draft of which had previously circulated to the Steering Group for comments, is available at: It was submitted to JISC on their deadline of 26/4/2010. This is a public document and will eventually be available from the JISC website. JISC provided a template and their guidance is that this document should be of use to any other institution that may wish to explore OER. At minimum, it would be useful to read Section 9 – Conclusions and Recommendations.

b)A Completion and Final Budget Report was also submitted to JISC. Again, it used a template provided by JISC. It is available at: This report will not appear on their website. It provided an opportunity to raise matters with JISC in a more confidential manner. At minimum, it would be useful to read Section 7, which identifies the extent to which we have addressed all our anticipated deliverables.

c)An evaluation report for the whole project is available at: The author is Sue Rodway-Dyer. This is primarily a very candid review of academic attitudes, both positive and negative, to OER.

d)Two peer reviewed publications / presentations have been produced:

  • Browne, T.J. & Newcombe, M. (2009) Open educational resources: A new creative space, in Same places, different spaces. Proceedings ascilite Auckland 2009. The presentation given at the conference is also available at: ASCILITE Conference Presentation.
  • Tom Browne, Richard Holding, Anna Howell and Sue Rodway-Dyer. (2010) The Challenge of OER to Academic Practice.OER10 Conference, Cambridge22nd March 2010. The abstract and presentation given at the conference are available from: Presenters were also invited to submit a peer-reviewed paper to the Journal of Interactive Media in Education by 11th May 2010. A paper has been submitted. We do not yet know the outcome. However, it has been made available at: should be read in conjunction with the project evaluation report noted above.

2.0 Additional activities

a)Tom Browne will formally begin his Open University SCORE Fellowship on 1st August 2010. It will be a 50%FTE commitment for 12 months. The accepted proposal submitted to the OU can be read at: The focus is staff development. Directly related, on 18th June 2010 he will be giving a presentation at the South West Educational Development Forum, in Bath.

b)Tom has been invited to join the newly formed Jorum Steering Group. The first meeting is in York on 2 June 2010.

c)Tom has been asked to present a paper on 23rd July at an event called Open Educational Resources International Showcase - UK Perspectives on Open Educational Resources, see : The focus will be a ‘case study’ approach on how to make a case for OER release to senior managers.

3.0 The future of Open Exeter

a)A paper was presented to VCEG on 19th April 2010. That paper is also available at: The draft minutes from that meeting state:

A proposal to take forward the JISC funded Open Exeter (OER - Open Educational Resources) was discussed and was supported by VCEG as the way forward for Exeter. VCEG felt that taking the project forward would have the added value of ensuring that Exeter’s online learning materials actively engaged the students in their learning. VCEG’s support was subject to the project incorporating a formal procedure for ensuring that the materials were interactive and much more than lecture notes and PowerPoint slides.

Michele Shoebridge also reported that as a JISC OER call had been issued on 16 April Exeter intended to put a proposal in to this call rather than bid for SDF funding. The proposal would require some institutional matched funding and Michele would report back to VCEG once the matched funding figure was available to discuss how it might be funded.

Subsequent conversations, still ongoing, have taken place regarding taking forward the paragraph above.

b)JISC/HEA recently released Phase 2 tender for OER. We are actively pursuing one of the options and the relevant text (slightly précised) from the tender is noted below:

Enhancing the discovery and reuse of OER materials - Collections of OER based around a thematic area. A number of 1 year projects (at up to £75,000 each) led by English HEIs will be funded to draw together OER resources for a subject or theme in the following way:

A static collection of key OER resources at level 1 (first year undergraduate) AND adynamic collection (i.e. links to resources which will change automatically over time, for example via an incoming RSS feed) of OER and other resources at more advanced levels (UG level 2, 3 and PG) syndicated via RSS/Atom. Other resources could include open research papers, research data, news stories, key blogs etc.

These projects should be closely aligned with relevant subject or thematic networks – for exampleAcademy Subject Centres, professional bodies and national subject associations. Funding will not support the creation of new resources (though projects may add these if they wish) but will support the repurposing of existing open resources. Where license conditions permit, repurposed OERs should also be deposited in JorumOpen.

We are supporting these collections in order to make OER material more easily findable by those with an interest in particular thematic areas. Materials are already available via a number of specialist online services, such as our own JorumOpen, the OCWC and OERCommons, and via search engines. We wish to investigate how thematic and subject area presentation of OER material can make resources more discoverable by those working in these areas.

The above relates closely to one of our core proposals in our paper to the VCEG. The emphasis on discoverability also addresses an area currently not fully addressed for Open Exeter. We are seeking to identify STEM material which, if possible, is also aligned to areas of research excellence. 24th June is the deadline for submitting a bid. Projects start on the 31st August. We are currently engaged in positive conversations with colleagues from BioSciences and Engineering.

c)Also included in the tender, though at this stage for information only is the following text:

Open material for accredited courses for teachers in higher education. This aspect of the programme will be directly commissioned from the HEA, who will work with partners to release materials related to courses meeting the national professional standards for staff who teach in Higher Education. Up to £250,000 will be available for this area of work, which will meet all the requirements (licensing, deposit, release levels, metadata, sustainable practice) placed on other OER release projects. Further details of this sub-strand will be released in due course by the HigherEducationAcademy.

This opportunity has some synergies with Tom Browne’s OU Fellowship. We are also in independent discussions with Oxford and Falmouth regarding possible partnerships.

4.0 Budget

a)Some additional money is available to all projects involved in the Pilot phase, and therefore includes Open Exeter. To quote:

Continuing the monitoring of pilot project OER reuse. The twenty-nine projects supported in the existing phase of UKOER have been charged with tracking the use of the OERs released during the funded life of their project. To enable them to continue to do this (and report their findings to us) as they move into sustainable practice they will each be awarded a further £1,000 to offset the reporting burden. We will contact existing projects with further details of these payments and conditions.

We have not yet received any further information. Note that our project did undertake some initial exploration of Cloudworks for this purpose.

b)Our budget surplus, as note in our Completion and Final Budget Report (see URL at 1.0b in this report), is £2,572.39. We are invited by JISC to propose to them how we could retain this money for additional OER-related activities.

5.0 In Conclusion

Open Exeter, available at : has not yet been explicitly launched, though it is now notionally open for business. Until its future is more assured, and it can be offered as a formal service, it would be unwise to formally advertise the availability of the repository internally and most definitely not internationally. However, in anticipation of such a launch taking place at some point, a meeting is being held soon with Rob Mitchell (Communication Services).

Tom Browne,

Education Enhancement, Academic Services

Page 1 of 4 Report-6 submitted to OER Steering Group, 4/6/2010 Tom Browne