Open Educational Resources: a regional university’s journey

Abstract

In a region of geographically scattered, small island states, developing quality-enhanced learning materials across the hugely diverse, predominantly ocean-based learning and teaching environments, continues to present new challenges. This paper explores the potentially transformative nature of Open Educational Resources (OER) in a regional university. Against the backdrop of the bold, new Strategic Plan 2013-2018, University of the South Pacific (USP) educators are faced with transforming learning systems, practices and pedagogy to achieve excellent standards in learning teaching and knowledge creation. Selected case studies are provided to support the discussions for the application and development of OER at USP and the integration of Open Learning Design (OLD) principles and practices. In the drive to enhance the quality of learning and teaching through integrating OER and OLD, research provides the most compelling results for informing practice to achieve effective and sustainable responses to the achievement of the Strategic Plan objectives. Keywords

Meta-syntheses of OER Transition in Online Higher Education

“…Mtebe and Raisamo (2014) recommended that one way to address these barriers was for institutions to invest in the preliminary work of creating and promoting pro-OER policies, before initiating the conversion process. A case study exploring the incorporation of OER into courses at the University of the South Pacific (USP) reinforced the correlation of extensive preparation and research to the success of OER integration (Koroivulaono, 2014).…”

“…USP felt that OER offered them an opportunity to address the disparity of educational availability and economic hardships of their students, so they began exploratory studies to determine how faculty and students would perceive and value the use of OER in class rooms (Koroivulaono, 2014). After gauging stakeholder interest, USP pushed their practices and pedagogy to grow to new levels by creating a new transformative learning system, employing frequent tests to improve technical aspects of the system (Koroivulaono, 2014). USP proceeded to engage their faculty and students in the integration process, with a series of OER awareness seminars aimed at educating their stakeholders about the benefits of this innovation (Koroivulaono, 2014).…”

Assessing the potential for openness: A framework for examining course-level OER implementation in higher education

“…Finally, in terms of the technical suitability of resources, and specifically meeting challenges such as Internet capacity constraints that limit access to rich, multimedia resources, the University of the South Pacific (USP) developed a resource quality testing strategy that resulted in the design of contingency plans, such as preloading learning materials onto tablets and onto a local intranet, to mitigate connectivity issues at its institution (Koroivulaono, 2014).…”

“…Networked, or user-shaped strategies they potentially become obsolete, is time consuming and can interrupt the continuity of resource delivery (Koroivulaono, 2014;Myers, 2012). While individual strategies may be limited in their ability to take advantage of the full potential of OER, enterprising individuals can and do successfully implement OER at the course level.…”

Lessons Learned from the Development of Open Educational Resources at Post-Secondary Level in the Field of Environmental Modelling: An Exploratory Study

“…Open education resources (OER) are materials that are openly available for reuse, modification, and sharing that originated in the later part of the twentieth century [1]. In 1994, Wayne Hodgins introduced the term "learning object" to describe any packaged digital resource useful for educational purposes [2,3]. Consequently, the concept of generative learning objects (GLOs) was developed to overcome restrictions that made it difficult to gain full benefits from the use of these generated resources [4].…”