Research to expand the use of Open Educational Resources

The OU has received funding to expand the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) and to share best practice case studies.

Dr Rob Farrow, Senior Research Fellow in the OU’s Institute of Educational Technology, has been awarded just over £93,000 from the H2020 European Commission fund for the European Network for Catalysing Open Resources in Education (ENCORE+) project.

ENCORE+ is responding to European Higher Education policy priorities of opening up and modernising education by creating a co-ordinated European OER for innovation.

Dr Farrow said:

"ENCORE+ represents an exciting opportunity to work with European partners to catalyse the availability and use of OERs. The OU team will lead the innovation strand of work, identifying and analysing successful cases of innovation through OER and related practices, and finding ways to share these practices more widely.

“We will be working with a wide group of international stakeholders to develop new practices and business models that support innovation through open approaches. This builds on The Open University and its Institute of Educational Technology’s outstanding reputations for innovation in technology-enhanced learning, as well as the Open Education Research Hub's leadership in open research."

The OU is already bringing free learning resources to millions of people worldwide and now is one of nine partners working on this project, which will run until the end of 2023. The others are: International Council for Open and Distance Education, Norway; Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University, Germany; International University of La Rioja, Spain; Knowledge 4 All Foundation, United Kingdom; Joubel AS, Norway; Fondazione Politecnico di Milano, Italy; Instructure Global, Norway and Dublin City University, United Kingdom.