Reusing OER – SCORE Residential Fellowship Course

Reusing OER – session facilitated by Andreia Inamorato dos Santos  (OLnet/SCORE)

This afternoon I ran a session on OER reuse for the Open University SCORE short-term residential fellowship course. The task was for the fellows to pick a theme and look at their colleague’s OER created during the residential course, and also throughout the web and discuss a set of reuse questions. Interestingly, reusing OER does not seem to be the a simple task. Participants  have argued that quite often the OER sites link to resources that are not clearly OER (licensed materials) and it was very difficult for them to keep track of the licenses as they were searching for OER.

Finding suitable OER and assessing quality were also issues raised. Participants argued that they could not always find OER for the topic that they had chosen to work around. If they found OER, assessing quality did not seem to be straightforward. They mostly compared OER  in terms of the usability of the websites  rather than going through a checklist of OER quality indicators – authorship (credentials), design, license (copyright clearance),  etc. This shows the importance of the tools provided/not provided in the websites to reuse OER . Most academics in this group argued that the OER websites they came across did not seem to pay attention to the reuse aspect – they often used pdf materials and had complex navigation.