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OER stories/OpenLearn, The Open University

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[edit] The challenge or problem

Since 1969, The Open University (OU) has been a pioneer in making learning materials freely available through its successful partnership with the BBC. As a distance learning institution with a commitment to openness, many of our television and radio programmes are already supported by free Internet activities and print materials. We wanted to use our knowledge of the latest technologies in education to extend our mission to be open to people, places, methods and ideas. The vision was free online education.

The OpenLearn story started in 2005 with a grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Sharing our aim to open access to education for all, they agreed to help us set up a pilot project that would run until 2008. Uniquely placed in the UK to deliver Open Educational Resources (OER) from our huge catalogue of materials, The Open University was granted US$4.45 million (rising to US$9 million upon reaching targets set for the first year) to make a selection of these materials available free of charge to educators and learners around the world.

Website development began in May 2006 and, in October 2006, The Open University became the first UK university to provide free access to their course materials with the launch of OpenLearn. Already OpenLearn offers a full range of Open University subject areas from access to postgraduate level. By April 2008, 5,400 learning hours of media rich resources, offered in hundreds of self-contained study units, will be available online.

The richness of the self learning materials, delivered in a highly interactive open source virtual learning environment, positions OpenLearn as a leader in the second generation of OER providers – OER 2.0! The power of providing our content in a number of open formats was recognised with an award from the IMS Global Learning Consortium in 2007.

We feel that OpenLearn contributes to a new generation of Open Educational Resources in several ways:

through its commitment to using open source software and standards to encourage reuse and remix in even the most remote parts of the world;
the use of social software to connect learners in peer supported communities;
providing structured study materials and sense-making software to help learners get the most from their learning.

Supported Open Learning is at the heart of the Open University's approach to distance learning. The challenge for us was in transforming materials developed under this model for a publicly accessible, open content website that would provide peer support in an exclusively online learning environment.

[edit] The context

The Open University set up OpenLearn in 2006 to better understand the implications of Open Educational Resources for the future of learning. Funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and enabled by the Creative Commons license, The Open University has joined a global network of major players in the field.

For decades, The Open University has transformed the lives of many individuals whose background and previous experience had barred their entrance to traditional universities. The OU believes that Open Educational Resources have the potential to dramatically increase the number of lives that can be improved through education, both nationally and internationally. Through OpenLearn it hopes to achieve this.

OpenLearn enables learners with limited experience and confidence to become better prepared for formal education. It supplies 'reintegration-level' material for those wishing to return to higher education after time out, provides workers with an opportunity to upgrade their skill base and progress their career, and offers structured learning and tools to support teachers working with under-represented groups. Opening our materials to the world has seen use in the first 10 months by over 700,000 learners in 160 countries. We have reached out to learners outside The Open University, enriched our existing partnerships with educational providers in the UK and developed new relationships around the world.

So much has been achieved already, yet this is just the beginning. We knew from the start that this was a bold move to take. The interest generated by the project both in the UK and abroad points to the potential transformative nature of Open Educational Resources in the higher education community. We are moving forward at such a pace that pushing boundaries is the only way to understand how we can best serve learners in the future.

A message from Professor David Vincent, Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Strategy, Planning and External Affairs

"OpenLearn represents the University’s bid to place itself once again at the forefront of the educational use of information technology. The University can claim to have invented Open Education Resources (OER) through its pioneering partnership with the BBC in the early 1970s which deployed the cutting edge media of the day to reach a large audience, most of whom were not paid-up university students. The technology of communication has moved on, and is presenting new opportunities for higher education. Most of the sector is engaging with e-learning within the framework of conventional modes of delivery, and in the context of long-established business models. The OU has taken up the challenge of exploring whether and in what way web-based media offer an entirely new concept of the higher education community. OpenLearn is seeking to understand the consequences for learners and teachers of making available high-quality, pedagogically-informed learning to all who have access to the internet. The outcome of the project will inform the future reach of the OU nationally and internationally.

"The University has been undertaking a review of its strategic direction and is publishing the outcome in the 2007 edition of OU Futures. This identifies three key business areas:

OU Core – our central business of delivering supported open learning to fee-paying students;
OU Plus – our partnership function through which awards are offered to students through intermediaries; and
OU for Free – experimental activities to develop and test radical new business models based on free access to learning materials and tools.

"OpenLearn represents the first step in the third of these areas. It represents a substantial investment by the University in a piece of large-scale action research which will inform how we take forward the third, highly innovative aspect of the University’s development."

[edit] Engaging the University community

OpenLearn aims to become part of the fabric of The Open University’s work, whether that is around teaching and learning, research or business and community engagement activities.

As a pan-University project that employs 4 full time academic staff to work with 17 acdemic staff in each of our faculties and also has key representatives in non-academic units such as the university library and Student Services, it is crucial to use internal communications channels to share information. Initially this meant explaining why the university was 'giving away' its content. We've used internal printed publications, the intranet, the university screensaver, events, webcasts, a monthly newsletter, staff development training sessions, a mailing with staff payslips and regular meetings to get the messages out to staff. As a 'national' university with staff based around the UK this has been a significant task.

It is important to focus on the benefit of the project to the University. OpenLearn offers Open University faculties and associate faculties a test bed for extending their own skills and competencies in using new technologies to develop courses. It can play an increasingly important role in the creation and testing of new curriculum materials that they would not otherwise get the opportunity to do within existing programmes due to limited resources; or that would not be readily seen as having a large enough market to justify the normally high investment required for a substantive course or programme. The issue of relating with faculties is crucial for the project, and ongoing discussions revolve around building strategies for locating the project more clearly and productively within the institutional context.

[edit] Action

OpenLearn is divided into two environments:

LearningSpace, which aims to provide learners with access to pedagogically structured Open Educational Resources, the opportunity to make their own pathways through those resources, and specially developed social software and discussion forums to enable collaboration and group work.
LabSpace, which provides all LearningSpace material and other, less well-structured material, with the intention that it will be downloaded, remixed and reused by the community in ways that are suitable for them. Remixed content can be uploaded to the LabSpace to add to a growing collection of community generated open educational resources.

Within these two environments OpenLearn provides:

study units, which normally require between 10-15 hours of study (ranging from access to postgraduate level) and are designed to take full advantage of the online medium. Media-rich, with self-diagnosis and learning outcomes, each stand-alone learning chunk is suitable for independent learners;
subject themes, ranging from the arts and humanities, to science and technology (as well as major interdisciplinary programmes), and which offer the widest possible choice, encourage the highest level of usage, and achieve cross-cultural appeal;
a large range of study skills material which enables less confident learners to engage with the curriculum materials.

[edit] The OU approach

Open University material is specially developed for distance learning. This material is complemented by a UK-wide network of tutors and a range of innovative technologies, which enable group work and support, either online or in occasional face-to-face meetings. We call this approach Supported Open Learning.

This background and experience makes the OU’s hundreds of thousands of hours of learning materials an important contribution to the OER movement. It has meant that the OU has been able to fulfil its aims to go beyond simply providing learning objects for reuse by educators, and provide material with the distance learner in mind and with the technologies in place to enable sense-making.

OpenLearn believes that the sophistication of its materials has provided a new generation of Open Educational Resources.

[edit] In practice

The nature of the materials and expertise at the OU meant that an open website could be launched within five months. During this rapid development period, the team negotiated the differences between developing materials for Open University students, under a supported open learning model, and transforming those materials to publish them openly to the world.

These differences presented debates around:

pedagogy and structure
use of third–party materials
use and integration of multimedia
localisation
assessing quality in the transformation process
prioritising the provision of content over e-learning resources
fair representation of the OU offering.

These debates are discussed at length in our research and will be added to over time by the community of users as they use the LabSpace to amend OpenLearn materials to suit their own needs, contexts and realities.

Content process

Two models for re-purposing OU materials into OpenLearn units were agreed early in the project: the integrity and the remake models.

The integrity model keeps OpenLearn units recognisably similar to the original OU course. Often existing text is divided into smaller units, activities are translated into an interactive form and other resources (such as audio clips) are embedded rather than being delivered separately.
The remake model takes the source material as a starting point of what needs to be taught. This is then redesigned for web-based delivery. This can be compared to writing the screenplay of the novel where the source is a good starting point but the finished article is an almost complete reworking.

Although OpenLearn provides a breadth and level of study to appeal to a broad audience, it does so with a focus on areas which satisfy both current demands in the UK educational market and contribute to work-related learning. Such areas include writing skills, the environment, management and leadership, psychology and languages. Rather than present the subjects as we do internally, units are grouped together in topic areas that make sense to a wide audience.

Subjects likely to interest a mass audience are informed by the OU’s collaboration with the BBC. Numerous broadcast programmes include Rough Science, Child of our Time and Coast. Viewers are directed to the open2.net website to access educational activities relating to broadcast programmes. Progression to OpenLearn’s more in-depth material is a natural next step in this non-formal learning journey.

A message from Jerard Bretts, Programme Manager

"Content production has been one of the most interesting aspects of the project, presenting a number of stimulating challenges from which we have learned much. Production processes were adjusted and refined allowing us to meet demanding targets for learning hours; selection criteria provided to faculty colleagues was clarified to ensure that the most suitable material was put forward for the project; and extra staff were made available to ensure we had the necessary editorial capacity.

"A fundamental issue was the balance between keeping faith with the source material and retaining most of it (with some presentational changes) and undertaking substantive reworking of the material to fit the currently-assumed ideal characteristics of web-based learning materials – limited text and plenty of interactivity. We made the decision to follow the integrity model of transformation in the first year, where all material in the unit is recognisably similar to the original, as complete as possible, and can be studied in exactly the same order. This required us to secure permission to retain third party material present in the original and meant that not all the material offered by faculties to OpenLearn for the launch could be used. However, some of it will appear through a remake model of transformation in the second year of the project."

[edit] Creative Commons license

OpenLearn content is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence. This means that anyone may make use of OpenLearn content freely and without charge. Users are free to amend, rework and combine OpenLearn content with any other content issued under a similar licence for non-commercial purposes. The only condition is for any reuse to acknowledge our original work.

The resources used in an OU course may include a varying proportion of third-party materials, with copyrights not owned by the university. It is common practice to include text-based resources from the relevant subject literature and broadcast audio-visual material commissioned by the University. One of our aims in managing the intellectual property elements of OpenLearn was to retain as much as possible of the third party materials in our original courses. Thanks to the support of rights holders and the efforts of our clearance team, we have successfully cleared over 99% of all third party content offered and kept within our budget. Providing clear guidelines to the faculties has helped with identifying materials that are unlikely to be problematic.

Rights issues around content such as video, music and the commercial software packages used within IT and computing courses are complex. Where rights cannot be cleared, we look into the cost of developing alternatives to third party materials – either new content or open source alternatives to proprietary software. If this proves too costly, however, the decision is made not to publish the material in the LearningSpace. Sometimes the incomplete resources are made available in the LabSpace, where a global community of users can work towards transforming them into new Open Educational Resources.

Our guidelines to OU faculties

Notify us when music is essential to the learning
Contact us for advice before submitting CD and DVD based materials and third party materials which can be expensive to clear
Indicate if materials are co-published
Indicate if the material is owned by an author or group of authors and not The Open University
Set books can be included up to 1,000 words without any special clearance
Materials that might not be cleared for the LearningSpace might be published in a different form in the LabSpace
Include a hard copy of all materials along with transcriptions for audio-visual materials
Include acknowledgments and copyright information.

[edit] Social and sensemaking software

Online learning is often undertaken by individuals in their home or place of work, in physical isolation from others studying the same material. Social software that allows these individuals to come together as communities of learners can play a vital role towards the achievement of the desired learning outcomes.

OpenLearn’s FlashMeeting enables video conferencing from within a web browser and requires no download. Virtual lectures, physical lectures and workshops can be recorded, broadcast and published as reusable learning objects.
MSG is OpenLearn’s instant messaging tool. By showing learners that others are online and within easy and immediate contact, MSG encourages peer-to-peer support, especially useful in an environment without formal tutor support. Learners are able to find each other geographically using an interactive map. They are only one click away from chatting with learners around the world.
Compendium mind-mapping software allows learners to create visual maps of the connections between ideas, issues, arguments, documents and websites. Learners can map concepts, debates and meetings, or design new learning pathways simply by dragging and dropping web resources. These maps can then be shared with the rest of the community for collective benefit.

[edit] Interoperability

OpenLearn’s commitment to the philosophy of openness is apparent throughout the project. Using Moodle, the open source virtual learning environment platform, meant that the team could draw on the open source community to get the website up and running within months. In return, The Open University is now the largest single Moodle developer group and is able to share its expertise back to the community for mutual gain. We have made particular advances in accessibility for learners using assistive technologies.

Interoperability extends the reach of our content to more learners. Working to agreed and open technology standards enables others to deliver our content in ways that suit their existing learning communities. Moodle users can easily replicate the content on their own websites. For others, zip files of study units include the XML source code, metadata and all audio-visual assets. These can be easily downloaded, reworked and uploaded as a new version within OpenLearn.

Further interoperability with SCORM, IMS CP and IMS CC is under investigation, as are collaborations with other providers to test out and deliver content across other platforms.

Our open philosophy on the macro level extends to the micro level. Sharing our code means anyone can experiment with new ways of delivering content - not least our own academics who are constantly innovating in ways to deliver distance education.

So far this approach has seen OpenLearn units being delivered as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds and FeedCycles (timed to deliver chunks of daily learning from a unit to anyone who subscribes), and reproduced in wiki format. Where OpenLearn owns the rights to the images, audio and video within a unit, these have been published on popular social networking sites such as YouTube and Flickr.

[edit] Research

OpenLearn is an initiative with research at its heart. Opening up education for free and online is an experiment, and we need to learn how it impacts on us, on others carrying out education, and on our users. To do this we have used a range of methods - we see the whole initiative as 'Action Research', giving us a way to try things out and monitor what we do. Everyone involved in OpenLearn contributes to this research by finding new ways to process course material, spotting opportunities to work with others, and experimenting with novel approaches to reaching communities.

Our users are also part of this research process by letting us know how they make use of our material or feeding back their experience as an active participant. A core Research and Evaluation team collates this information, plans how to build on any possibilities and reaches out to gather information from the wider world.

Developing the site has meant trying to work out how people will use it; in the early design stage this meant imagining how users would work, and building up scenarios to describe how we would expect different sorts of users to behave. To know what users think, we need to ask them and watch them carry out a range of tasks. We can do this at our usability and accessibility facilities, where we use techniques such as eye-tracking. This lets us record the way people look at the screen. We can see the difference between users scanning pages, reading them or getting lost. This helps them to explain their choices to us and helps us analyse data from usability studies.

Working on OpenLearn has raised many research issues. At first the focus was on our own production processes and how we could meet the deadline to launch a service in less than five months. Workshops helped us look at the way new technologies can be envisioned before they are launched. We used paper prototypes to arrive at a model for the content and learning designs that would be shaped over time. As the site has matured we have looked at encouraging participation through appropriate forum design, use of tools by learners and educators, and how we take the LabSpace from a proving ground for new technologies to a space to share ideas between researchers, collaborators, educators and the interested world.

Research and evaluation depends on two key skills: thinking through consequences by devising experiments, and gathering data. The research team has adopted the website’s learning tools, proving their value as research tools. FlashMeeting has enabled internal research meetings, interviews with remote participants and collaborators, the sharing of seminars and giving talks without travelling. Compendium has been used to carry out activity analysis and build design maps of how learning activities work online.

A message from Patrick McAndrew, Research and Evaluation Director

"The role of Research and Evaluation Director means running a small team of my colleagues, Steve, Andreia and Jo.

"Steve looks at the users’ experience by examining the data, looking for patterns and then contacting people to find out more about their experiences. He comes across some great stories and has helped expand on what possibilities exist for open learning. Andreia has established international connections and takes an interest in how we can sustain our activities into the future. She analyses the structure and discourse of OER to see what it reveals about our – and others – Open CourseWare. Jo keeps organisational matters in order by tracking our meetings and budgets and has been the key person in organising our first conference, OpenLearn 2007.

"Research work on OpenLearn requires some changes in approach in switching from the relatively controlled groups of learners working on courses that we run for Open University students, to large numbers of learners who we know very little about. Our experience has shown that some people work through everything like our own students, following the structure offered. However we also need to offer immediate benefits to passing visitors. All this insight we are gaining helps us refine OpenLearn, responding to the needs of non-formal learners."

[edit] What worked

We are constantly evaluating the OpenLearn project and you will find the outcomes of our research on the Knowledge Network website.

A few stories that show OpenLearn in action are mentioned here to give a flavour of how the website is opening doors to education for all.

[edit] International collaboration

Two Brazilian researchers working on OpenLearn have been forging research collaborations with their home country, fostering open learning communities around the world and strengthening global awareness of OER.

Ale Okada is working with a group of 40 lecturers who are members of the community of Portuguese-speaking countries. Based in six countries, they use FlashMeeting to meet online to share knowledge. Open Educational Resources are created from their discussions on open learning issues, such as elearning games, web 2.0 and blogging. Compendium knowledge maps have been created on e-democracy and media literacy. Published on the website, they help spread awareness among the Portuguese speaking community.

Andreia Santos has been working with the University for the Development of the State and Region of the Pantanal (UNIDERP) since April 2007. In Brazil, demand for higher education is huge; distance education has increased by 100% in the last year. Many people are excluded from education for financial reasons during their twenties, and it is possible that Open Educational Resources will support their re-engagement. Access to open content materials online could also help meet the demand for knowledge of individuals and communities seeking information for professional development, and educators who wish to enhance their teaching materials.

The research project is entitled 'Implications and practices of the use of Open Educational Resources in higher education at UNIDERP: an experience in collaboration with The Open University UK - OpenLearn'. The aim is to open access to content that could be used to support the curriculum, as well as providing a space for the sharing of the educational materials produced by the Brazilian institution. UNIDERP allocated their own researchers to adapt and translate resources for use in Brazil. Published alongside UNIDERP’s broadcast lectures, shared as OER for the first time in the LabSpace, the resources will increase the reach of OpenLearn materials. OpenLearn will benefit from evaluating how OER works across different cultures, and how it may enable successful collaboration in course development.

UnisulVirtual, the distance education campus of the University of the South of Santa Catarina, proposed OpenLearn to be one of its content collaborators. It is working with Andreia in a content-publishing activity, which began in July 2007. UnisulVirtual offers undergraduate courses in a range of subjects and specialized online training programs for various governmental and non-governmental Brazilian organizations. UnisulVirtual will use OpenLearn resources in its courses and publish some of its own content in the LabSpace, enriching the diversity of the materials in OpenLearn and enabling it to reach a larger Portuguese-speaking community.

[edit] UK initiatives

Improving skills and employability

Open University staff tutor Tony Coughlan has been using OpenLearn in two projects to benefit those working with disadvantaged children. Staff working at Barnados, a UK children’s charity, are attending face-to-face sessions and joining an online community to improve their skills base through OpenLearn.

In another project, the Children’s Workforce Network of Plymouth City Council is using OpenLearn to provide a common learning experience for team building. The practitioners involved are working in a variety of fields, from psychology to social work, and are based at over 15 locations around the city. In response to the Every Child Matters agenda, these staff are being called on to work together in new ways. Units related to cross-team issues, such as 'Understanding children', provide a starting point for a training programme that supports a reorganisation of how these practitioners collaborate, communicate and share a common understanding.

Widening participation in higher education

In Yorkshire we are leading a project that introduces (or reintroduces) people to learning by using OpenLearn tools and materials at a series of 'taster' events and awareness sessions in community centres. Focusing on Black and Ethnic Minority (BME) groups, the project uses OpenLearn to show participants what OU materials look like and what is expected of them.

One example is that of working with Asian women adult education students at Bradford College. One group is completing ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) courses, and the other studying health and working with children. Partnership with a local college allows us to visit students at 'pinch points', before the end of the courses, to introduce Open University materials. Where there is Internet access, OpenLearn is the main vehicle to enable the students to make conscious decisions. Both they and their tutors can try out the materials, which starts the process of preparing for educational achievement. Many of these women would be lost to the system because family or cultural ties make their participation at traditional campuses difficult. Working with OpenLearn, further education colleges and voluntary sector organisations (amongst others), allows the project to bridge this gap and provides participants with real opportunities for progression.

The continuing challenge for the project is to integrate this initial activity into core practice, and to systemise the approach to widening participation, total inclusion and equality. Integral to this is equipping participants with IT skills to ensure that they are not excluded from continuing elearning on their own, and can embark upon a long-term commitment to learning. We will continue to work in areas of multiple deprivation in terms of income, employment, health deprivation and disability, education, skills and training, housing, and geographical access to services. The next stage is to target parents through schools and further education colleges that often have excellent ICT facilities. This will help us in supporting the use of elearning materials and also engage the community more widely.

OpenLearn is acting as a vehicle to attract local community ambassadors, peers and learning champions. We want to encourage greater diversity in our Associate Lecturer community and OpenLearn could be a driver to help achieve that. As more people become engaged with the Open University through free access to materials, we may begin to see greater representation of academic staff from BME groups in our own workforce.

Finally, OpenLearn is being used in a project in Leasowe, on the North coast of the Wirral, an area with large areas of deprivation and that is isolated from amenities and services. Leasowe Development Trust offers a range of services, including Open University courses, to residents. OpenLearn has been used in fortnightly face-to-face sessions to help introduce people to online study and to supplement their current study programmes with study skills support.

[edit] Reaching remote communities

The Community Library

OpenLearn materials are being republished in the form of a desktop library by the Global Library Services Network (GLSN). Designed to enable remote communities around the world to access quality content offline, the desktop library is supplied at electronic resource centres throughout the world. Librarians can download the materials onto a memory stick and transfer them to more remote offline users. The learner can also download a free Personal Learning Centre to create their own customised and searchable digital library of relevant resources on their desktop. The production process has been automated so that any OpenLearn study unit can be split into sections and republished in an e-book format on the community library in under 30 minutes. Navigation of OpenLearn and associated materials is provided using Compendium knowledge maps. Users can then extract the sections they want for their personal portfolios, adding other materials as relevant to their needs. The collaboration will continue, with GLSN currently preparing to share some of its resources in the LabSpace.

Decision making in Guyana

In an ambitious pilot project with the University of Guyana, we have been trialling OpenLearn's tools to increase the capacity of the Makushi tribe to participate in environmental decision-making about their region. OpenLearn researchers have provided parts of the OpenLearn toolset (Moodle, Compendium and FlashMeeting) to explore how a team of western scientists can work with scientists and communities in a developing country, when there are clear disparities in power, economics, infrastructure and education. This is not straightforward, but in our view the combination of OER and open source tools provides part of the answer. Engaging with integrity and providing a sociotechnical platform can develop capacity in the longer term, but only if there is sufficient time for local partners to gain ownership of the resources and tools, and if the technical infrastructure is good enough.

Open Ecosystem in Cameroon

Dr Shiyghan Navti’s education was made possible by a scholarship from the Cameroonian government. Based in the UK but having grown up in Cameroon, he had been working to create a knowledge network to enable the African diaspora to connect and collaborate. In 2005 he developed the Open Ecosystem, a Moodle based website where people could contribute their knowledge for the benefit of professionals, teachers and learners. The initial pilot focused on materials for medical professionals. More recently, the open source Elgg application was used to provide the Open Ecosystem with social networking capabilities. An offline version of the platform also developed, making it possible for educational resources to be delivered to learners in remote communities with no internet connection. This increased uptake in areas where internet connectivity is slow and expensive. A number of institutions in Africa have begun running pilot e-learning programmes.

The Open Ecosystem team had heard about OpenLearn while looking for partners who could help them deliver their vision on a greater scale. The synergy was clear, so in June 2007 they approached the OU to find out how we could work together. Community participation and ownership are two strong motivational forces for development in African communities. The ability to author through the LabSpace, along with the use of a collaborative, open source platform that teachers in Cameroon were already using meant that OpenLearn content could be delivered and used by them within weeks.

[edit] Our choice of Creative Commons license

Our choice of the Creative Commons licence has generated a great deal of debate, both within the commercial rights industries and within education. Commercial rights holders are both intrigued and threatened by the development of new ways of licensing intellectual property that are not based upon territorial markets, payments or technological protection. Reaction has ranged across a very broad spectrum, from the comment of one legal advisor, "Anyone who chooses to use a Creative Commons licence either doesn’t understand what they are doing, or doesn’t care", to that of some OER proponents, who see our choice of a licence that prevents commercial use as unnecessarily restrictive.

Our own position is that we chose the Creative Commons licence as the licensing mechanism that best allows us to deliver the outcomes of the OpenLearn project: wide acceptance worldwide, easily understandable terms, and a degree of protection against unauthorised commercial exploitation of resources that we intend to deliver freely to the global educational community. It is not our remit to support commercial businesses by giving them access to free content.

We find that the Creative Commons model delivers our licensing requirements very effectively, and we were anxious to get started in a very pragmatic way with the business of producing and delivering open content. Our focus is very definitely on the licence as a means to an end – we are much more concerned with releasing content, rather than concentrating on developing the perfect licence. Having seen too many projects stall while waiting for the perfect solution, we took the approach of adopting a licence and then measuring its impact as we got on with the project.

So far, the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence has delivered everything that we have hoped for. And not least among those deliverables has been entry into the debate generated around open licensing in general and the Creative Commons licence in particular; we have engaged in debating and sharing experiences with colleagues in education, with commercial rights holders, and with representative licensing agencies worldwide.

[edit] What didn't work

Having launched the website within five months, we expected to be constantly evaluating user feedback and developing the site's functionality, design and content. In the first year we have responded to the need for users to be able to print entire study units with the click of a button; we have recognised the barriers to remixing units through Moodle and XML downloads and are now testing a solution for in-situ editing of our content; we have debated the process of developing Open Educational Resources at length with our academic community to resolve many of the complex issues involved in transforming our materials for OpenLearn. Our research papers in the Knowledge Network give in-depth detail of these issues.

[edit] Remixing content

The 'open' in OER doesn’t just mean, "Take this for free". It means that if other people think they can improve it, they can lift the cover and change the entire contents and behaviour of the resource.

The first step in providing the 'source code' for OpenLearn resources has been to deliver them as structured, marked-up text (XML in various schemes), designed to assist authors using other software tools to manipulate the structure. It’s fair to say that in Year 1, we haven’t seen a huge amount of remixing via this route, since XML is for elearning specialists who are comfortable with digital formats. We are even running a competition to encourage the community to create examples to demonstrate the potential benefits to other educators.

Structured data exchange of this sort is critical to the future of OER and the elearning economy, but by far the wider community is that of teachers and academics, for whom the remix tool of choice is their word processor. This makes the remix data format of choice a textual, prose file — in other words, the linear, print version that we now offer for our OER, which they can copy and paste into their editor.

In retrospect, a lesson learnt is that we could have offered this option first, to make it as easy as possible, as early as possible, for non-technical users to adapt our materials. The availability of easily printable resources is still a key factor for the use of OER anywhere where there is a low-tech environment, or poor Internet literacy - not only in developing countries, but in community educational work in any area.

[edit] Next steps

We are now working to double the number of learning hours that we provide, reaching out to new people. We are constantly enhancing the learning environment as we integrate new tools to connect learners and respond to their feedback. Our work with partners to research and evaluate the impact of Open Educational Resources will not only inform the OU’s ongoing work as a driver of innovation in education, but contribute to the wider community’s understanding of what this might mean for their work. We are committed to sharing what we are learning, and have published 10 research papers that cover the complexities of delivering a new approach to education. We hope to give an insight into how OpenLearn has enriched our current relationships with educational providers, opened doors to new ones around the world, and begun to affect learner’s life chances.

[edit] Year 2 action

In Year 2 (April 2007-2008) we will:

work towards providing 5,400 learning hours of content in the LearningSpace and 8,100 hours in the LabSpace
strengthen the range of introductory level material and, in particular, that content relating to skills development
focus on one or two areas for in-depth content provision. The two subject areas we are considering are global environmental change and childhood studies
develop a short course on copyright and rights issues associated with open content delivery
increase the diversity and range of content in terms of media richness and interactivity
improve pathways through the content using cross links, advanced search tools, knowledge maps and user tagging of content
personalize the LearningSpace and LabSpace landing pages through myMoodle
make learner wikis available
integrate video blogging and community news tools into LabSpace
release Cohere, an extension to our knowledge mapping software
provide greater interoperability and integration with other providers and back into the OU, through work on IMS CC, CP, SCORM, RSS and on merging with the SA schema, designed for direct CMS access and greater interlinking with other OER initiatives
experiment with putting all the materials from a small number of our shorter, 100 hour courses in the LearningSpace to monitor their impact on current and future students
continue user studies and surveys.

[edit] Sustainability

We will also be looking at the crucial issue of sustainability beyond April 2008, investigating potential models and collecting evidence to help us make an informed decision about how to move forward. OpenLearn aims to become part of the normal fabric of The Open University’s business, whether that is around teaching and learning, research and business, and community engagement activities. The support activities needed to run OpenLearn can be embedded within all parts of the organization, in as many staff as possible, with a small co-coordinating team to manage the site and its functional development.

OpenLearn offers Open University Faculty and Associate Faculty a test bed for developing their own skills and competencies in using new technologies to develop courses. It can play an increasingly important role in the creation and testing of new curriculum materials; an opportunity that they would not otherwise get due to limited resources, or that would not be readily seen as having a large enough market to justify the normally high investment required for a substantive course or programme.

Finally, OpenLearn should play an important part in The Open University’s Strategic Priorities, namely to: