Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
partner was expected to do this in the context of their own culture and institutional
context. In our experience, all of the partner universities taught in English, so the
adaptation was not a translation, but a cultural refit, in order that the level and type of
material is in keeping with the existing institutional curriculum. The OECD report
also raises the issue of developing countries becoming dependent on externally gen-
erated content, rather than using OER content to produce locally relevant material
(p. 105). The projects addressed this issue by focusing on three staff development
processes in the use of OER: (1) adapting existing OERmaterials; (2) adapting exist-
ing material from the partner's own university; and (3) creating some new material
to integrate them into a whole. In short, there was considerable practice in materials
development that is both locally relevant and realistic in resource demands.
The authors have previous experience with the use of Open Access tools for
community development (Mason & Rennie, 2007). This involved training in the
community use of educational technology, the development of non-formal educa-
tional resources, and the detailed evaluation of the process to ensure transferability
to other community education initiatives.
The Process
Using wikis and other social software, a number of activities were structured to
support the partnership in contextualising existing content to fit their national cur-
riculum. Wikis and a group-hub communications application were also utilised to
disseminate and co-ordinate the detailed structure of the month-to-month project
activities. Using the model of a “course module” around which all the other partner
activities, resources, and skills are structured, we jointly developed higher educa-
tion material on the general topic of “sustainable development and tourism” that
could be re-purposed and subsequently delivered in some format in each of the part-
ner institutions (not necessarily the same format for each academic partner). Each
partner produced three types of content:
1. re-purposed existing open content resources
2. re-purposed existing institutional resources
3. new, short, wrap-around text to contextualise the materials to the locality.
We chose three ways of enabling student access to the learning resources:
(1) through a wiki publicly accessible to all learners.
(2) through OpenLearn—the Open University's application for distributed resource
development and sharing.
(3) through a CD for distribution to students.
All academic partners received training in the use of a wide variety of media:
video clips, photos, quizzes, and audio clips, in addition to text-based resources.
