Open educational resources (OER)

Open educational resources can be defined as teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, material or techniques used to support access to knowledge.

— OER FAQs, Higher Education Academy

Simshare is part of a one year programme (May 2009 – April 2010) funded by the Higher Education Academy and JISC aimed at opening up resources for learning. A total of 29 projects in three strands – individual, institutional and subject – have received funding. See the Higher Education Academy OER page and JISC OER page for full details.

One of the subject based projects is the Bradford Open Educational Resources Project, led by Mark Van Hoorebeek (Bradford University Law School).

What do open educational resources look like?

The POCKET project has deposited a number of law resources in the OpenLearn repository – see the international economic law module from the LLM in Commercial Law at the University of Derby, broken down into six units.

Project EnROLE, an Australian community for online role play, is a good example of the kind of resource Simshare is aiming to create.

Last Modified: 4 June 2010