The balancing act of collaboration, openness, quality and ensuring impact in the creation of OER resources

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • McNally, Michael B.
  • Brailey, Michelle

• This presentation examines the tensions in developing a large scale, institutional OER project and the
  care that must be undertaken in a project with a diverse range of team members, stakeholders and
  learners. The University of Alberta’s (U of A) Copyright OER project, funded through a Centre for
  Teaching and Learning (CTL) Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund grant, aims to develop a series of
  OER tutorials for use in graduate courses, specifically within the Faculty of Education, but also available
  to the broader campus community, and to ensure such resources are open and can be adopted and
  adapted by post-secondary institutions across Canada.

  The project has numerous stakeholders including the Copyright Office, Centre for Teaching and
  Learning, U of A Libraries, Technologies in Education and the School of Library and Information Studies,
  which presents logistical challenges in coordinating meeting s and resources. More importantly the size
  and scope of the project results in key tensions around design quality of the tutorials versus openness as
  the team aims to create high quality, interactive video resources without using proprietary software
  (e.g. Articulate or Captivate). As a result a complicated range of software has been combined to ensure
  openness, discoverability, interactivity and preservation. A second major tension focuses on creating
  tutorials including learning objectives and assessments suitable for graduate students to use in the
  context of specific courses, a more general academic audience, and to ensure the materials could even
  be of use to the general public. Finally, a third tension centers on how to develop the resources as an
  institutional project and maintain the degree of control necessary to design the tutorials and prioritize
  the content covered within each tutorial, while also engaging the broader community, specifically of
  copyright officers and librarians in Canada, to enhance the quality of resources and reduce duplication
  of effort among institutions. The presentation will examine the decision made to carefully balance these
  tensions and competing interests and priorities with the goal of informing the audience how to navigate
  such decisions in other large scale, institutional OER projects, particularly ones that are not
  course/subject matter specific.

• Date created

  2018-05-30

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Open educational resources
  • Opening Up Copyright
  • Copyright instruction

• Type of Item

  Conference/Workshop Presentation

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-jett-1348

• License

  Attribution 4.0 International