ENCORE+ Innovation Showcase
Drivers, Barriers, Challenges and Enablers
Welcome to the first ENCORE+ Innovation Briefing!
This document provides a conceptual framework for the evaluation of examples of innovation which uses the affordances of open educational resources (OER). OER are teaching and learning materials that are either in the public domain or published on an open licence which permits various forms of redistribution, reuse and repurposing. Many organisations and higher education institutions around the world are using such resources, and anecdotally many believe this is supporting innovations in practice. However, there is scant research into how such innovations should be understood or evaluated conceptually.
In the ENCORE+ project we developed a framework for understanding innovation with OER and used this as the basis of a stakeholder survey. There were two goals for this activity. Firstly, to generate brief but useful case studies which illustrate a range of different instances of OER. These provide concrete examples of implementing OER in different circumstances and reflections from project leads on their experiences and
lessons learned. The second goal was to validate the framework being used to evaluate the cases. The goal of this evaluation was not to judge different instances as superior or inferior to one another but to provide a new set of concepts and language for thinking about the relationship between OER and innovation.
The framework and its rationale can be found below, and the complete survey (which is free to reuse or adapt) is available after the case studies. We hope that this collection illustrates the diversity, ingenuity and geographical distribution of OER projects and serves to provide further inspiration to educators and learners.
Coordinator of this work:
The Open University (UK)
Participants:
Knowledge 4 All (UK)
The Open University (UK)
