Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 13
Designing Higher Education Courses Using
Open Educational Resources
Frank Rennie
1
and Robin Mason
2
1
Lews Castle College, University of the Highlands and Islands Millennium Institute, Stornoway,
Isle of Lewis, Scotland, e-mail: frank.rennie@lews.uhi.ac.uk
2
Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
Introduction
Over the last few years in particular, as a result of funding from the European Union
Asia-Link Programme (Edushare, 2009) and the Edulink Programme (Sidecap,
2009) among others, we have been working with a number of universities in Asia,
Africa, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific to assist the professional development
of staff in the area of the design and support of distributed learning resources. It
became obvious fairly quickly that all of these partners, to a greater or lesser extent,
face severe technical and financial constraints in any attempt to introduce and/or
expand educational technology within their institutions. In many cases it became
apparent that even when pedagogic and technical skills were available, the costs
of proprietary software, online journals and databases, and hardware/connection
issues are sufficiently serious to prevent any significant progress. As we investi-
gated potential solutions to improve the quality and flexibility of the curriculum
with these partners, it led to a realisation that open access to, and the re-use of,
educational resources to improve courses in higher education is a common problem
shared by university staff in the “developed” and the “less-developed” countries,
albeit that it is often viewed from different perspectives. This in turn led to a focus
on skills training and “capacity building” of staff in the development and use of
open educational resources (OER) in course design for distributed education. All
of the institutions involved in these projects, including universities in the Maldives,
Cambodia, Bhutan, Nepal, Turkey, Mauritius, the University of the West Indies, and
the University of the South Pacific, have geographically distributed campuses. The
three European partners in the project are all universities that are heavily involved
