Open Education Week Blog Roundup

Many thanks to all those who contributed to our Open.Ed blog series for Open Education Week.  It was great to see such a wide range of staff, students and graduates contributing to the series.  Here’s a round up of the blog posts we shared over the course of the week.

Sustainable Support for OER

By Lorna M. Campbell, OER Service.

Launched in 2016, the University’s OER policy encourages staff and students to use, create and publish OERs to enhance the quality of the student experience.  This policy was approved by the University’s Learning and Teaching Committee, situating OER directly in the domain of teaching and learning.

Digital Futures for Learning: An OER assignment

By Dr Jen Ross, Centre for Research in Digital Education

Experiencing first-hand what it means to engage in open educational practice gives student an appetite to learn and think more.

Wikipedia in Higher Education: How students are shaping the open web

By Jemima John, graduate of University of Edinburgh School of Law and Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian in Residence

A Wikipedia assignment isn’t just another essay or presentation that students may never return to, but something that has actually been created; a way of demonstrating the relevance of a student’s degree and communicating their scholarship in a real-world application of teaching and learning.

It’s Good To Share: Creating open interactive content with Xerte

By Alison Christie, Learning Technologist, University of Edinburgh Business School

I have been championing Xere open content creation tool because it doesn’t require a high level of technical ability to create engaging and interactive content for different pedagogical approaches. This makes content creation open to everyone, not just developers.

Translation and Open Education – An Experiment using Wikipedia

By Dr Iraklis Pantopoulos, Edinburgh College of Art, and Dr Charlotte Bosseaux, Translation Studies, School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh.

Writing to be read not writing merely to be assessed made a huge change in the mindset of the students and was a challenge they were eager to tackle! They now wrote with a potential global audience in mind and were very conscious of the fact that Wikipedia editors would be scrutinising their work.

Reflecting on the Importance of Open Education

By Martin Tasker, former Open Content Curation Intern and University of Edinburgh graduate

In an age where where the world is both more connected and less trusting than ever, the onus is on institutions such as universities to use their reputations and resources to promote open education. As well as benefiting the public, it benefits the institutions themselves – there’s little better in the way of marketing than having potential applicants having already experienced some learning at your institution.

Women @ Wikipedia….Open Learning and a hobby for life!

By Karen Bowman, University of Edinburgh

Open Learning has helped me enjoy learning from the past and creating materials again to acknowledge the women who made it possible for me to march, to have a political voice, complete graduate education, and have a long, varied and satisfying professional life.

Student Outreach, Experiential Learning, and Academic Impact – the benefits of OER

By Dr Andy Cross, School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh

The impact and legacy of this collaboration has been broad and lasting. Student created resources have reached a much wider audience beyond the original project client (usually just one school or group), and we are able to track how many times the resources have been downloaded, alongside qualitative feedback on the usefulness of the resources themselves.