Preparing your OER project


 

The skills needed to build and implement an OER initiative

One of the most important questions to answer is who will be responsible for building or contextualizing OER to suit your institution’s needs? The answers may vary.

 

It could be individual instructors or faculty members, or it may be a specialized development unit within the institution that includes instructional designers, software developers and media specialists.

 

However the human resources are selected, the focus should be  on identifying the skills required for the job.

 

 

What skills do OER developers need?

OER developers can be elementary, basic education or high school teachers, or college or university teachers or academics wanting to develop and/or re- contextualize open educational resources (OER).

 

As instructional developers they will likely have some introductory skills and knowledge in using technology for developing instruction with an interest in deepening their multimedia technology skills for both high and low bandwidth environments.

 

They must be strong communicators with a desire to seek out local knowledge and resources to ensure the OER are localized to encourage use, understanding and contextualized learning (Stacey, 2007; Wiley 2007).

 

The developers will have some or all of the following characteristics or skills:

 

 

 

What are the contexts in which developers do their job?

The ideal way for any OER initiative to work is within the existing international OER repositories to provide additional educational resources to encourage OER developers to create, re-use and alter OER materials for new educational contexts.

 

OER developers will be working in a variety of different settings that will include, but are not limited to;

 

 

 

Learning from others: A first step

A smart way to proceed is to explore how others have produced OER. Here are two useful approaches.

 

  1. Identify the approaches used by existing OER developers who create and reuse OER materials and to determine their areas of challenge and where they see the need for learning materials in instructional domain you have identified.
  2. Identify the technology “tool kits” currently used in OER development and where the future seems to be directed. 

 

OER providers such as those noted below could be contacted for advice, or to answer question you may have.

 

 


 

References

Rawthshorne, P. (2007).  Using open educational resources for international curriculum development. Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada.  Available: http://www.rawsthorne.org/docs/PeterRawsthorne.OERProgram.pdf