Introducing Open Educational Resources

This task was designed to help guide discussions during the first meeting of partners on the C-SAP (Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Sociology, Anthropology and Politics) Open Educational Resources [OER] Phase II project: Cascading Social Science Open Educational Resources. Through the use of reflexive tasks, the project team aims to develop a collaborative framework for cascading OERs within social sciences.

We would like to get a sense of where our project participants are in terms of motivations, expectations etc. to participate in the second phase of the OER programme. The task will also help us reflect where we are in terms of our understandings of Open Educational Resources and what the cascade project is about. Importantly, we would like to start thinking about the cascade framework in a collaborative, reflective way as this is a fundamental concept for the project and definitely something that we will be grappling with until next August! We have provided some prompts for you below, however, you do not have to answer each and every question as they are there for guidance only.

We would like you to reflect on the following questions:· What is your understanding of Open Educational Resources?

· How would you explain them to colleagues in your department/institution? Your administrators? Your students? Why should they/your institution care about OERs?

· What do you hope to gain from your participation in the cascade project?

If you decide to provide a written contribution, it doesn't have to be very formal and could be in the form of bullet points, notes, mindmap etc. Feel free to experiment with the format but don’t forget about accessibility (for guidance on accessibility please consult JISC Techdis website)! For instance, if you decide to offer a video where you discuss your understandings of OERs, please provide a transcript.

Copyright C-SAP, 2010. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

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