Festival of Learning 2018

This presentation examines the tensions in developing a large scale, institutional OER project and the care that must be undertaken in a project with a diverse range of team members, stakeholders and learners. The University of Alberta’s (U of A) Copyright OER project, funded through a Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund grant, aims to develop a series of OER tutorials for use in graduate courses within the Faculty of Education and to be available for adoption and adaptation beyond the U of A.

The project has numerous stakeholders including the Copyright Office, Centre for Teaching and Learning, U of A Libraries, Technologies in Education and the School of Library and Information Studies, which presents logistical challenges in coordinating meetings and resources. More importantly the size and scope of the project results in tension between the design quality and the openness of the tutorials, as the team aims to create high quality, interactive resources without the use of proprietary software (e.g. Articulate or Captivate).
As a result a complicated range of software has been combined to ensure openness, discoverability, interactivity and preservation. A second major tension focuses on creating tutorials including learning objectives and assessments suitable for graduate students to use in the context of specific courses, a more general academic audience, and to ensure the materials could even be of use to the general public. Finally, a third tension centers on how to develop the resources as an institutional project and maintain the degree of control necessary to design the tutorials and prioritize the content covered within each tutorial, while also engaging the broader community, specifically of copyright officers and librarians in Canada, to enhance the quality of resources and reduce duplication of effort among institutions. The presentation will examine the decision made to carefully balance these tensions and competing interests and priorities with the goal of informing the audience how to navigate such decisions in other large scale, institutional OER projects, particularly ones that are not course/subject matter specific.