- Materials development and quality assurance policy guidelines to ensure appropriate selection, development, quality assurance, and copyright clearance of works that may be shared.
A good starting point for consideration of OER is to have clear policies in place regarding IPR and copyright. A clear policy would for example, plainly lay out the respective rights of the institution and its employees and sub-contractors, as well as students (who might become involved in the process directly or indirectly through use of some of their assignment materials as examples) regarding intellectual capital. As part of this policy process, it is worth considering the relative merits of creating flexible copyright policies that automatically apply open licences to content unless there are compelling reasons to retain all-rights reserved copyright over those materials. Simultaneously, though these policies should make it easy for staff to invoke all-rights reserved copyright where this is justified.
A logical consequence of reconsidering human resource policy will be development or updating of costing/resourcing and performance management systems so that they reward staff for the following:
- Time spent in developing educational resources.
- Using resource-based learning where it is more effective than lecturing.
- Harnessing other people's materials when it is more cost-effective than producing materials from scratch.
- Sharing their intellectual capital through global knowledge networks to improve their resources and to raise both their and their institution's profile.
What are the best ways to build capacity in OER?
The skills required for institutions to harness OER effectively are many and varied. A fuller list is provided in Appendix Nine, but they include the following:
- Expertise in advocacy and promotion of OER as a vehicle for improving the quality of learning and teaching in education.
- Legal expertise relating to content licensing.
- Expertise in developing and explaining business models that justify, to institutions, individual educators, and other creators of educational content (including publishers), the use of open licensing.
- Programme, course and materials design and development expertise.
- Technical expertise.
- Expertise in managing networks/consortia of people and institutions to work cooperatively on various teaching and learning improvement projects.
- Monitoring and evaluation expertise.
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