Many thanks to Klara Finnimore and Vicky Drew from UKSG for inviting the University of Edinburgh’s OER Service to speak on our experiences of sustainable strategic support for OER at their UKSG OER Online Seminar 2025. Below are the slides and transcript of the presentation.

Presentation created by Lorna M. Campbell and Stephanie Charlie Farley.

Open for good Strategic support for OER (PowerPoint file)

 

Here at the University of Edinburgh, we believe that open education and the creation of open knowledge and open educational resources, are in keeping with our institutional vision, purpose and values, as we seek for our graduates, and the knowledge we discover with our partners, to make the world a better place. And that our teaching and research is relevant to society and we are diverse, inclusive and accessible to all.

Our student union were instrumental in encouraging the University to support OER, and we continue to see student engagement and co-creation as being fundamental aspects of open education.

The University’s vision for OER is very much the brain child of Dr Melissa Highton, Assistant Principal Online Learning and Director of Learning and Teaching Web Services. Our vision for OER has three strands:

For the common good

• Teaching and learning materials exchange to enrich the University and the sector.
• To put in place the support frameworks to enable any member of University of Edinburgh to publish and share online as OER teaching and learning materials they have created as a routine part of their work at the University.
• To support members of University of Edinburgh to find and use high quality teaching materials developed within and without the University.

Edinburgh at its best

• Showcasing openly the highest quality learning and teaching.
• To identify collections of high quality learning materials within each school department and research institute to be published online for flexible use, to be made available to learners and teachers as open courseware (e.g. recorded high profile events, noteworthy lectures, MOOC and DEI course content).
• To enable the discovery of these materials in a way that ensures that our University’s reputation is enhanced.

Edinburgh’s treasures

• Making available online a significant collection of unique learning materials available openly to Scotland, the UK and the world, promoting health and economic and cultural well-being.
• To identify a number of major collections of interdisciplinary materials, archives, treasures, museum resources to be digitised, curated and shared for the greater good and significant contribution to public engagement with learning, study and research (e.g. archive collections drawn from across disciplines, e.g. History of Medicine/Edinburgh as the birthplace of medicine/Scottish history/social change).
• To put in place policy and infrastructure to ensure that these OER collections are sustainable and usable in the medium to longer term.

 

Another backbone of our strategic practice is the concept of copyright debt, coined by Dr Melissa Highton:

“From the moment a colleague tells you that they don’t have time, or don’t care about the copyright licensing and metadata on their teaching materials and load them up into a VLE, online course environment, departmental website, online course-pack, lecture power-point slides, whatever, you start to accrue ‘copyright debt’. The cost will hit at the moment that you migrate from one VLE to another, or from one website to another, or from one media asset management system to another.”.  – Dr Melissa Highton Copyright Debt, https://thinking.is.ed.ac.uk/melissa/tag/copyright-debt/

Tying all of this together our Open Educational Resources Policy to support open education and the creation and use of OER, was first approved by our Education Committee in 2016, updated in 2021, and is undergoing another review in 2025.

It’s important to be aware that our OER Policy is informative and permissive. Some universities mandate that any resource considered for internal teaching awards must be open licensed. While we encourage all colleagues to share their resources under open licence, and the sponsors of awards to consider OERs in their award criteria, we didn’t enshrine this in policy.

Our 2021 update brought the OER Policy in line with our Lecture Recording Policy and Virtual Classroom Policy. With the increase in media being recorded, knowledge of data protection has become essential when creating and sharing open content. The policy clarifies what personally identifiable information colleagues should be aware of when creating open resources, including names, images, voices and personal opinions of individuals. (You can read and re-use our open policies for learning and teaching)

The 2021 update of our policy also adopted the 2019 UNESCO Recommendation on OER: “Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others.” – UNESCO Recommendation on OER, CC BY-SA 3.0, UNESCO

Central to the Recommendation, is the acknowledgement of the role that OER can play in achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and particularly Sustainable Development Goal 4: to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.  This reiterates our commitment to openness and achieving the aims of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which the University is committed to through the SDG Accord.

Along with the OER Policy In 2016 the University launched an OER Service, based in Information Services Group Next year we’ll be celebrating 10 years of both our policy, the OER Service, and the many ways that open has benefited our staff and students. The service provides staff and students with advice and guidance on creating and using OER and engaging with open education. We offer support directly to Schools and Colleges, and employ student interns in a range of different roles, including Open Content Curation interns. We also work closely with our Wikimedian in Residence, Ewan McAndrew.

The OER Service both supports and is supported by a range of central services. Here is the structure of our information Services group, highlighting the services and teams we interact with on a regular basis. We provide training and support to colleagues across our Information Services Group and to learning technology, professional, research, and teaching staff across the university.

 

The OER Service’s digital skills programme helps to increase understanding of the benefits of using and creating OERs, encouraging open practice, and improving copyright literacy among both staff and students.

Open education, practice, and resources are embedded in our learning technologies and services, and open education, practice, and resources are embedded in our learning technologies and services. Our resource/reading lists are openly viewable and open licensed, and our media technologies and management system teams integrate open licenses and practices.

The OER Service also works very closely with our Online Course Production teams. While some institutions require that any resource produced in cooperation with the central learning technology service must be open by default, although we don’t mandate this, it is often the case in practice here at the University of Edinburgh. The majority of the teaching and learning resources created with support from the Online Course Production Service for our free short online courses, and Resources created for MOOCs in collaboration with our Online Course Production Service, are open licensed and are available on Media Hopper Create.  The OER Service also runs Open.Ed a one stop shop that provides access to open educational resources produced by staff and students across the university.

Here at the University we trust colleagues to quality control their own teaching and learning resources, and we do not have a central OER repository because they are often unsustainable, and it can be difficult to encourage engagement. Instead, the policy continues to encourage colleagues to share their open licensed teaching and learning materials in an appropriate repository or public-access website so that they can be discovered and re-used by others.

The OER Service provides access to many channels for this purpose on both University and commercial services, and we aggregate a show case of Edinburgh’s OERs on the Open.Ed website. We don’t have a formal peer review system for open educational resources.  The review process that different materials will undergo will depend on the nature of the resources themselves. So, we trust our academic staff to maintain the quality of their own teaching materials. Resources created for MOOCs in collaboration with our Online Course Production Service, will be reviewed by teams of academic experts. OERs created by students in the course of curriculum assignments will be formally assessed by their tutors and peers.

Speaking of OER as assignments, we’ve found that co-creating open knowledge and open educational resources through curriculum assignments can play a valuable role in developing core disciplinary competencies and transferable attributes, including digital and information literacy skills, writing as public outreach, collaborative working, information synthesis, copyright literacy, critical thinking, source evaluation and data science.

One fab example of open education and co-creation in the curriculum is the Geosciences Outreach Course.  This optional project-based course for final year Honours and taught Masters students, has been running for a number of years and attracts students from a range of degree programmes including Geology, Ecological and Environmental Sciences, Geophysics, Geography, Archaeology and Physics.   Over the course of two semesters, students design and undertake an outreach project that communicates some element of their field.  Students have an opportunity to work with a wide range of clients including schools, museums, outdoor centres, science centres, and community groups, to design and deliver resources for STEM engagement. These resources can include classroom teaching materials, websites, community events, presentations, and materials for museums and visitor centres. Students may work on project ideas suggested by the client, but they are also encouraged to develop their own ideas. Project work is led independently by the student and supervised and mentored by the course team and the client.

This approach delivers significant benefits not just to students and staff, but also to the clients and the University.  Students have the opportunity to work in new and challenging environments, acquiring a range of transferable skills that enhance their employability.  Staff and postgraduate tutors benefit from disseminating and communicating their work to wider audiences, adding value to their teaching and funded research programmes, supporting knowledge exchange and wider dissemination of scientific research.  The client gains a product that can be reused and redeveloped, and knowledge and understanding of a wide range of scientific topics is disseminated to learners, schools and the general public. The University benefits by embedding community engagement in the curriculum, promoting collaboration and interdisciplinarity, and forging relationships with clients.

The Geosciences Outreach course has proved to be hugely popular with both students and clients.  The course has received widespread recognition and a significant number of schools and other universities are exploring how they might adopt the model. A key element of the Course is to develop resources with a legacy that can be reused by other communities and organisations. Open Content Curation student Interns employed by the University’s OER Service repurpose these materials to create open educational resources which are then shared online through Open.Ed and TES where they can be found and reused by other school teachers and learners.

Another successful integration of OER assignments into the curriculum is our postgraduate Digital Futures for Learning module as part of the MSc in Digital Education. This course is mostly undertaken by current education professionals and the assignments:

• Encourage students to critically evaluate the implications of educational trends.
• Provide a platform to share their learning.
• Provides an opportunity to apply their learning into a tangible re-usable resource with ongoing value and legacy.

The course organiser Dr Jen Ross has written an excellent blog post on her reflections of using OER as assignment in the course: Digital Futures for Learning: An OER assignment. If you’d like to explore some of the resources made by the students you can find them on our Open.ed webpages: Digital Futures for Learning student OERs

These are just some examples of the way that open education and OER have been integrated into the curriculum here at the University of Edinburgh, and I hope they demonstrate how valuable co-creating open knowledge and open educational resources through curriculum assignments can be to develop essential digital skills, core competencies and transferable attributes.  There are many more examples we could share including academic blogging assignments, open resource lists, student created open journals, open textbooks, and playful approaches to developing information and copyright literacy skills.

Wrapping up, looking back at our own experiences our recommendations for sustainable institutional strategic support for OER are:

1. Align support for open education and OER to institutional strategy and global policy drivers, e.g. UNESCO Recommendation on OER, UN Sustainable Development Agenda.
2. Create a permissive policy environment to encourage staff and students to engage with creation and use of OER.
3. Provide central services to support development of digital skills, capability, and confidence.
4. Embed open education in the curriculum through Wikipedia editing and OER creation assignments to development of transferable digital and information literacy skills.
5. Engage students in the co-creation of learning experiences and OER.
6. Develop course materials that are open by default, ensuring they are sustainable, accessible and reusable.

Further information

Open Educational Resources (OER) Service https://open.ed.ac.uk/

Open Media Bank https://media.ed.ac.uk/channel/Open%2BMedia%2BBank/

Short Online Courses https://www.onlinecourses.ed.ac.uk/

GeoScience OERs https://www.tes.com/teaching-resources/shop/OpenEd