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What’s the (re)use of OER part 2

March 18th, 2011 at 04:03

Earlier this month, I wrote a blog post exploring the irony between the current lack of evidence for OER reuse and the frequency of copyright problems surrounding the potential misuse of third party materials. Clearly materials are being reused, but maybe not just OERs!? After all, do end users actually care if they are reusing OERs anyway? Does it matter if it’s OER or just ‘open’?

Last year (March 2010), we explored staff attitudes to open learning through an online survey. The full results are available here. In the survey, one of the main questions we tried to explore was what types of resources did staff at Nottingham want to make available and reuse? The results were illuminating.

Respondents listed Powerpoint slides (66%), reading lists (53%) and lecture notes (49%) as the three main types of resources they would publish openly, with Powerpoint slides (59%), lecture notes (46%), images (46%) and reading lists (43%) as the main types of resources they wanted to use openly. Do these resources represent the most useful resources, or just the easiest to create and reuse? Indeed, only podcasts, interactive objects, assessment options, images, animations and videos were listed as items which staff were more willing to use rather than publish; due to difficulty and time taken to create perhaps?

So if you are interested in reuse of open resources, are you making the right materials available? And are you making it easy to reuse them? Something we all need to consider…