OLnet: A New Approach to Supporting the Design and Use of Open Educational Resources

Introduction

This chapter revisits the view that online technologies can change the way we learn and teach. In particular it sets out some actions that can be taken to meet four challenges that have emerged from previous research and discussion in the community. These challenges are, in brief, to understand why:

• 1.

  Despite the rhetoric around the potential application of technologies in education, their impact on practice has been limited.

• 2.

  Teachers seem to lack the design skills needed to exploit the potential of technologies within their teaching.

• 3.

  There is an abundance of free resources (learning objects and Open Educational Resources) now available, but the majority of teachers do not use them.

• 4.

  Research into the use of technologies in education and into OER, on the whole, does not inform practice and vice versa.

These challenges are reflected in the concerns that others in the community have expressed but are also linked to our previous work in two areas - the development and evaluation of OER through the OpenLearn project¹ and Learning Design research as part of the OU Learning Design Initiative²

The structure we follow in this chapter is to first consider the background to the first challenge: what are the promises of online learning and what steps are needed to move those forward? Secondly a review of OER research and the associated challenges. Thirdly a description of the OpenLearn project. Fourthly an outline of the OU Learning Design Initiative. Finally we discuss the OLnet activity and how we aim through OLnet to bring together learning design and OER research within a community structure showing examples of how social networking approaches are starting to help us address the fourth challenge: linking researchers in OER to practice in OER.