Many initiatives for adoption of OER start as a project, financed by a one-time grant. Although ambitions may be different, too often the initiative is not continued when the project has ended (Orr et al, 2015). The question what approach leads to a sustainable practice for OER initiatives has ongoing relevance. Several studies are available for addressing the question “Is there still life after the grant?” (Downes, 2007; Tlili et al, 2020). One of the methods is making a professional Community of Practice (CoP) responsible for the quality and timeliness of the OER. Several successful examples are available where the project succeeded in creating a vibrant CoP maintaining an OER collection (Smith & Lee, 2016; Lambert, 2019). But Tlili et al (2020) also observed that many projects do not succeed in this endeavor, ending up with an unmanaged and unused collection of OER.
In 2017, a project was started that should ultimately lead to a situation in which 17 Dutch institutions of higher education with a Bachelor Nursing program create, share and reuse OER. In this project, much attention was given to create a vibrant professional Community of Practice (CoP) to realize a sustainable situation. Two grants were available for the initial period of 3 years. After this period, 11 institutions decided to continue for another five years working towards mainstreaming of OER, with a central role for the CoP.
To gain more insights into how project activities have led to the current situation, and how the role of the CoP in the way towards a sustainable way of sharing and reusing OER has developed, a study is undertaken.
This study analyses how the project has progressed on a national level and what changes this has brought about within the participating institutions. The study answers the following questions:
- How did the project proceed?
- Which elements contributed positively to the project result and which did not, and why?
- What has been the process of teachers adopting sharing and reuse of OER?
- What lessons can be learned from this project?
- What advice can be given to the Continuing Together Bachelor Nursing project and to other parties wishing to start a similar project?
In the presentation, the project, method of the study and the results are described.
References
Downes, S. (2007). Models for sustainable open educational resources. Interdisciplinary Journal of e-Skills and Lifelong Learning, 3, 029-044. IJELL - Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources
Lambert, S. (2019). The Siyavula case: Digital, collaborative text-book authoring to address educational disadvantage and resource shortage in South African schools. international Electronic Journal of Elementary Education, 11(3), 279-290. View of The Siyavula case: Digital, collaborative text-book authoring to address educational disadvantage and resource shortage in South African schools
Orr, D., M. Rimini and D. Van Damme (2015), Open Educational Resources: A Catalyst for Innovation, Educational Research and Innovation, OECD Publishing, Paris. Open Educational Resources : A Catalyst for Innovation | Educational Research and Innovation | OECD iLibrary
Smith, B., & Lee, L. (2016). Librarians and OER: Cultivating a community of practice to be more effective advocates. Journal of Library & Information Services in Distance Learning, 11(1-2), 106-122. https://doi.org/10.1080/1533290x.2016.1226592
Tlili, A., Nascimbeni, F., Burgos, D., Zhang, X., Huang, R., & Chang, T. (2020). The evolution of sustainability models for open educational resources: Insights from the literature and experts. Interactive Learning Environments, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2020.1839507
Info
Presented by:: Robert Schuwer, Marja Versantvoort
Conference Track: Plenary: OER Sustainability
Track Date/Time: 2022-05-25T10:00:00Z (your local time)
Language: English
Pretalx link: The Truth is Out There: Dutch Nursing realized sustainable adoption of OER :: Open Education Global 2022 :: pretalx
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