Building an Open Educational Resource (OER) in Artefact 2: Open Learning

Building an Open Educational Resource (OER)

After reflecting on what openness in education means to me, a follow-on assignment was to design and deliver an open educational resource or OER developed from open resources, using OER repositories and other 'fair' or common resources.

I settled on a topic related to collaborative writing based on the idea of the 'book sprint,' a very social, collaborative and 'open' way to produce a book. A colleague was taking on a documentation project I had originally produced, and this topic sparked for me an interest in how book sprints could be used by technical writers and developers to collaboratively get the work done under tight deadlines. I wanted to connect the idea of 'agile' approaches to documentation, such as wiki-based documentation and doc sprints.

My topic changed several times as I navigated through many resources that didn't quite fit, either because of licensing or quality. I developed my own content on 'agile' for technical writers and made this content accessible through slideshare. My conclusion at the time, and today still, is that creating and repurposing OERs from existing (and non-existing) resources is not a straight-forward and clear process. It requires the educational community to work better together to make freely licensed content interoperable, more understandable and 'easier to do rights'.

Dana West has not chosen a license for this content.