Innovative best practices have emerged that inspire educators to enhance the delivery of their materials

Evidence to support content development and, particularly the reuse of materials has proven challenging to find in the education sector. Our work, therefore, has focused on identifying best practices in this area that include the efforts of both individuals and institutions across Europe (and beyond) who use, adapt, innovate and share such educational materials. Our surveys have revealed that a variety of learning platforms, tools and standards are used to promote the sharing of such materials as well as uncovering the reasons why these activities are so important. Awareness about the benefits of this work has been raised through a series of research reports, the development of an interactive online course about reuse as well as the promotion of a dedicated content development and reuse innovations space within the ICOPER website.

Recommendations

1. To promote a culture of reuse.
2. To disseminate the Openness philosophy.
3. To provide meaningful support and training for extending effective reuse.
4. To encourage the development of easy-to-use and efficient tools for saving time as well as effort.
5. To keep standards implicit and thoroughly tested by different stakeholders to facilitate the effective reuse.
6. To contribute to raising OER-related skills and expertise.
7. To raise awareness of the key issues related to Content Development for Reuse.

How did we get there?

There are several key issues to be taken into account when reusable content is initially developed. Findings from our best practices case studies as well as from previous investigations suggest that several factors can facilitate the greater adoption and improvements to the effective reuse and creation of reusable resources. There appear to be a number of recognizable phases, namely: searching, authoring, adapting and publishing reusable content.

Our primary solution to this problem is to raise awareness of the key issues around Content Development for Reuse. This can be done at an early stage of development whilst continuing to keep communities of practice engaged in sharing all relevant OER-related information.

Details of further suggested solutions, using the previously described headings, revolve around awareness raising, e.g.,:

Searching for reusable content

• Engage the academic community to share in different contexts ranging from initial searching for content in a simple form using open search engine tools to the use of advanced systems that filter and/or quality control the different OER repositories. (E.g. constrained search engines, Google Custom Search Engine, RSS feed list, the OICS – Open ICOPER Content space, etc.)

Authoring reusable content

• Encourage academic and support staff to value collaborative authorship in order to help end users to feel confident in creating, reusing and adapting OERs in their own contexts.
• Raise awareness of important features that ensure high content quality for learners. Successful content must be fun, interactive, interesting, visually attractive, engaging, etc.

Adapting reusable content

• Raise awareness of strategies that may facilitate the process of successful adaptation such as templates for adapting or localizing resources for different scenarios or contexts e.g. country.

Delivering reusable content

• Provide dynamic educational eContent via front end tools in a granular format.
• Distribute content in as many formats as possible.
• Enable people to evaluate the content and share their feedback with as wide an audience as possible.

Sharing

• The ability to publish OER materials to existing and new audiences.
• Understand the full implications of licensing schemes and follow established approaches from the existing wider Open Content/Open Source community.
• Ensure that all the right information is associated with every reusable object as well as travelling with the end product. In this way any user will know which part can be reused and understand any restrictions in its use.

In addition we have produced a New Media Library containing assets that can be been reused in numerous ways.

Visit

Our deliverables

ISURE:Recommendations for extending effective reuse, embodied in the ICOPER CD&R

http://www.icoper.org/results/deliverables/D4-3

ISURE: Quality control and Web 2.0 technologies report

http://www.icoper.org/results/deliverables/D4-2

Content-Development Methodologies Survey

http://www.icoper.org/results/deliverables/D4-1

ICOPER media wiki

http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/icoper

New Media Library

http://labspace.open.ac.uk/ICOPER_4

http://training.icoper.org/moodle/mod/resource/view.php?id=271