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Tel/Fax: 01482 465418 email: psc@hull.ac.uk www.heacademy.ac.uk/physsci

What are OER?

Open educational resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials typified by having an open licence (one that means no fee or royalty will be due for use of the material.)

Why create/use OER?

Resources are already being shared between academics. The advantage to offering your resources for reuse as OER is that you can stipulate how they should be reused (e.g. if changes are permissible). The advantages to reusing OER is that you can avoid ‘reinventing the wheel’ but still be sure that you are not infringing copyright when you reuse someone else’s work.

Skills for Scientists Project Partners

Project lead: UK Physical Sciences Centre

Project Partners: University of Edinburgh

University of Hull

University of Leeds

University of Leicester

University of Liverpool

Loughborough University

University of Manchester

Newcastle University

Open University

University of Plymouth

University of Reading

Sheffield Hallam University

University of Southampton

Staffordshire University

Universidade de A Coruña

The Institute of Physics

The Royal Society of Chemistry

What is the Skills for Scientists project?

This project has been supporting physical sciences academics at a range of HEIs. Participants were supported through the process of turning their existing resources into open educational resources and sharing them with potential reusers:

Typically, those involved with the project had been sharing their academic resources before but not as OER; the vast majority had never used an open licence before.

As a consequence of being involved in this project, participants indicated that they would be engaged in many activities included turning other resources into OER and creating resources with OER in mind from the start. They reported that they would use open licenses, approach using third-party material with more thought and add metadata to resources. Helping others was also part of their plan; they reported that they would tell or show others how to create OER, and how and where to find OER.

Respondents believed that, as a consequence of their being involved with the project, their institutions were more aware of OER, showed an interest in becoming more involved and some were developing policy around OER.

OER Released

To date, material equivalent to over 600 credits has been released through this project. Links to the OER pictured and all the others can be found on our website: http://bit.ly/skillsforscientists

Further Information

Full details of this project can be found on our website: http://bit.ly/skillsforscientists

The UK Physical Science Centre has produced a Briefing Paper on producing OER: http://bit.ly/oer_briefing_paper

and contributed to a wiki of detailed guidance on all aspects on OER: stemoer.pbworks.com

UK Physical Sciences Centre University of Hull Hull HU6 7RX

Skills for Scientists was funded by HEFCE through the Academy/JISC OER Programme

ACCESSIBILITY

• taking into account the accessibility of the content, file type, file size and site where the OER is shared

LICENSING

•selecting the correct type of open license for the OER and the IPR owner(s)

METADATA

•selecting the correct metadata that allows the potential reuser to locate the OER

SHARING

•selecting the appropriate sites that enable the potential reuser to locate the OER

Open Educational Resources – a force for change