Teaching Matters OER Theme Roundup

Last week, the OER Service’s Teaching Matters blog theme, marking five years of Open Education Resources at the University of Edinburgh, drew to a close.

In 2016, in order to support the University’s Vision for OER  the Learning and Teaching Committee approved an OER Policy that encourages staff and students to use, create and publish OERs to enhance the quality of the student experience, expand provision of learning opportunities, and enrich our shared knowledge commons. At the same time, the OER Service was set up to provide staff and students with advice and guidance on creating and using OER, engaging with open education, and developing information and copyright literacy skills.

This series of blog posts, curated by Stephanie (Charlie) Farley, explores how colleagues from schools and colleges across the University have engaged with open education and embedded OER in the curriculum in order to enable students to develop essential core disciplinary competencies and transferable attributes, while enhancing their professional practice and co-creating open knowledge.

Open for Good: Five Years of Open Education Resources at the University of Edinburgh

Dr Melissa Highton, Assistant Principal Online Learning and Director of Learning, Teaching and Web Services (LTW), introduces the series by reviewing the development of Open Educational Resources (OER) services at the University over the last five years.

From Open Science to OER and Open Textbooks

Dr Jill MacKay, a lecturer in veterinary science education at The Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies and The Roslin Institute Easter Bush Campus talks to Charlie about the development of her Open Textbook on R, a programming language. Their conversation speaks to one of the beauties of the open movement; that you don’t have to use everything in the exact same way…

Licensing Guidance on Studying videos as OERs

Dr Sarah Ivory, Director of the Centre for Business, Climate Change, and Sustainability (B-CCaS) and Lecturer in Climate Change and Business Strategy, University of Edinburgh Business School, talks to Charlie about her creation and open licensing of ‘Guidance on studying at university’ videos based on content from her book Becoming a Critical Thinker: for your university studies and beyond with Oxford University Press published in January 2021.

Open Education Resources (OERs) from the School of Geosciences: The unforeseen benefits

Dr Andy Cross and Kay Douglas reflect on five years of collaborating with the Open Education Resources service to open license resources from their Geoscience Outreach student’s projects. Dr Andy Cross is the Impact Coordinator for the School of GeoSciences, and Kay Douglas is a teacher and mentor on the Geoscience Outreach Course. This is the fourth post of the ‘Hot Topic’ theme: “Open for Good: Five Years of Open Education Resources at the University of Edinburgh”.

Using Open Education Resources (OERs) To Make a Real-World Impact: The Sustainable Global Food Systems MOOC

Lizzy Garner-Foy, Instructional Designer in the Educational Design and Engagement team, shares how using open licensed content enabled their teams to develop high quality educational content within the limitations of 2020’s Covid-19 lockdown restrictions. Ever since our launch in 2015, the Open Education Resources Service has worked closely with the University of Edinburgh’s Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Distance Learning at Scale (DLAS) projects to embrace open practices and ensure that, as much as possible, the high-quality educational content produced is made available for use and re-use on open licenses…

Five years on: The LGBT+ Healthcare 101 OER

Dr. Jeni Harden, Senior Lecturer in Social Science and Health, talks about how the open education resources created for the LGBT+ Healthcare project in 2015 have contributed to the medicine curriculum over the past five years.

Edinburgh Clinical Research Facility’s (ECRF) on Rainbows and Their OER Strategy

Edinburgh Clinical Research Facility’s (ECRF) OER enthusiasts, Jo Merrifield, ECRF Education Manager, and Danielle Marlow, ECRF Development Coordinator share their aim to spread clinical research information with their own OER strategy.

Open e-Textbooks for Access to Music Education

The  OER Service and the Reid School of Music are delighted to have received a Student Experience Grant in order to undertake a research and development project to explore creating an open e-textbook from the Fundamentals of Music Theory course.

Interacting with artwork creating OER gifs

PhD student Eleanor Capaldi talks about collaborating with the Open Education Resources service to run a version of Stephanie (Charlie) Farley’s OER: Introduction to GIF making workshops. The workshops introduce copyright and open licensing through playful development of GIF making skills, and engage participants in using open licensed and public domain digitised artworks.
Screen capture of Teaching Matters blog