Salzburg (AT), February 2008 - Open Educational Resources (OER) have gained a great deal of attention in the last few years. From January 2006 to December 2007, Open eLearning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS), a project co-funded by the European Commission under the eLearning Programme, explored how OER can make a difference in teaching and learning.
The project consortium comprised the European Centre for Media Competence (Germany), the European Distance and eLearning Network (Hungary), the FernUniversität in Hagen (Germany), the Mediamaisteri Group (Finland), the Open University of Catalonia (Spain), and the project co-ordinator Salzburg Research, EduMedia Group (Austria).
Experts who understand OER as a means of leveraging educational practices and outcomes define OER based on the following core attributes:
The OLCOS project aimed at promoting OER through various activities and products, such as:
The comprehensive study, entitled the OLCOS Roadmap 2012 on Open Educational Practises and Resources, explores possible pathways towards a higher level of production, sharing, and usage of OER in education, especially as eLearning scenarios. It also provides recommendations on measures required to support decision making at the level of educational policy and institutions.
The roadmap emphasises that the knowledge society demands competencies and skills requiring innovative educational practices based on sharing and evaluating ideas that foster creativity and teamwork among learners. Collaborative creation and sharing among OER learning communities is regarded as an important catalyst of such educational innovation.
The OLCOS project also developed free online tutorials whose objective is to support students and teachers in the creation, re-use, and sharing of OER. To promote hands-on work, the tutorials provide advice on how to search for OER, materials that can be re-used and modified, production and licensing OER, and websites to which OER materials can be uploaded for both end-use and enhancement.
The tutorials will be accessible for the European and international eLearning community beyond the end of the OLCOS project because they are available on a Wiki-based platform called WikiEducator. This means they will also continue to evolve since they can be updated by anybody.
To support the idea of OER, the OLCOS tutorials had to be open, free, and collaboratively developed. Thus, the project team saw WikiEducator as a suitable platform for the involvement of both outside authors and other interested parties. It is a community project that cooperates with the Free Culture Movement towards a free version of the education curriculum by 2015, and the decision to use this platform has been fruitful for both parties.
The launch of the OLCOS tutorials in September 2006 was a highlight for the WikiEducator team, attracting an average of 1000 hits per day; today the number is often even higher. In his Weblog in December 2007, Steven Downes named WikiEducator as the "best educational wiki". He commented, "WikiEducator is chosen as the most ... active of these initiatives".
