A write up of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Breakout at our first OKN event in January.

A quick round table of our breakout group revealed that there was a desire for clear guidance on sourcing and using images, a framework to make it easier/encourage people to use and publish OER, and a clear explanation of the differences between closed teaching environments and where these become open environments and Open courses.

Most of the group were unaware of the Open.ed.ac.uk website providing this guidance, or the OER and Copyright services being provided out of ISG, or the Teaching and Learning OER Policy.

The message wasn’t reaching individuals and there was concern about the Silo behaviour within the University where many departments or groups are not interacting to share information or knowledge with others in the institution.

The OER service and Scholarly Communications in ISG are currently collaborating to run a copyright, licencing, and OER awareness campaign in 2017. Breakout participants were keen to add another level to communication by creating a way for Open Education Practitioners (OEPs) to locate and identify each other.

Methods suggested to achieve this included the use of hashtags on profiles in order to be able to easily locate and identify other OEPs, and/or an online forum such as Slack. The University has Yammer within Office365 which could be used to create an OEP forum group.

We’d welcome thoughts and comments on these points and suggestions, so please let us know what you think.