Dear Open Education Community

Prof. Rory McGreal, a UNESCO/COL/ICDE Chair in OER from the Athabasca University, Canada, is conducting a research for Contact North’s “Pockets of Innovation” series (https://teachonline.ca/pockets-innovation). The goal of the research is to show examples of successful implementations of OER focusing on the benefits to faculty and students specifically and not on cost savings – although applicable savings will be reported.

The studies will be used to encourage faculty in Canada and other countries to take up OER and implement their own programmes.

In this context he is specifically interested in information on how OER:

• Facilitates access to and success in learning.
• Enables more rapid quality course development.
• Has been transformative for a program or learning strategy in a specific institution.
• Has enabled faculty to adopt / adapt an approach to teaching and learning.
• Has lowered the costs to students and/or the institution.

Prof. McGreal has also developed a short template, below, with 5 main areas for capturing relevant information:
Opportunity: a brief description of the motivation for the development or adaptation of the OER. This is not the broad list of OER benefits but the specific experience of the individual faculty that led to their choice to try something new. 

Innovation: This is the core of the story, describing how they developed the OER or adapted it and how they used it in their teaching, how students used it, how it was integrated, how it was assessed – any aspect of teaching and learning.

Benefits: the faculty member’s view of how the OER helped learning, teaching, communications, independence, reduced preparation time, institutional awareness – whatever benefits they found or the students reported. Key is that it is the voice of the faculty member.

Challenges: the faculty member’s views of challenges in the process of preparation, teaching, assessing – and challenges reported by the students.

Potential: Future plans for more use of OERs – or less – or any other broader impacts of the experience.

If you would like to participate in this research, the deadline for providing information, using the 5-point template above, is 31 May.

The role of contributors to this project would be to provide data for the project. Recognition will be done through “Contact North” section at the bottom of the page. The commissioned study /report also would not preclude contributors from writing scholarly articles on their work and even using the published commissioned report as a reference. Copyright for these individual reports (cases) will be owned by Contact North in Ontario and published online under a CC-BY-SA licence.

For additional questions, please contact Prof. McGreal at rory@athabascau.ca