Leeds Met Repository Open Search

Open Educational Resources

What are educational resources?

Whilst purely informational content has a significant role in learning and teaching, it is helpful to consider learning resources by their levels of granularity and to focus on the degree to which information content is embedded within a learning activity:

• Digital assets – normally a single file (e.g. an image, video or audio clip), sometimes called a ‘raw media asset’.
• Information objects – a structured aggregation of digital assets, designed purely to present information.
• Learning objects – an aggregation of one or more digital assets which represents an educationally meaningful stand alone unit.
• Learning activities – tasks involving interactions with information to attain a specific learning outcome.
• Learning design – structured sequences of information and activities to promote learning.

What are Open Educational Resources?

While there is no authoritatively accredited definition for the term OER at present, the most frequently used definition is, "digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research" (OECD, 2007).

The UniCycle project

The UniCycle project - http://unicycle-leedsmet.ning.com/, a JISC funded pilot project to develop an OER repository at Leeds Met, completed in April 2010 (final report to JISC available here) and resulted in 235 resources being released under a Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales) licence including some of our well-established materials currently located on our Skills for Learning site - http://skillsforlearning.leedsmet.ac.uk

Our expanding Regional University Network (RUN) will also benefit from access to our materials as they deliver HE courses in an FE setting.

Now that the pilot has finished we are working with the TEL team to embed the OER repository into standard Assessment Learning & Teaching practice at Leeds Met; each faculty has an OER representative who you should contact in the first instance - if you do not know who this is email repository@leedsmet.ac.uk

Other uses of The Repository

We anticipate that, over time, the repository will continue to develop and may be used to store and, where appropriate, share student work including PhD theses and Masters Dissertations as well as digital images of heritage collections indeed, any of the disparate digital assets generated by a modern university. All material will be shared under an appropriate Creative Commons license.