File:POERUP D2.1 Transversal and categorised inventory of OER programmes and initiatives.pdf

Methodology

This report was delivered on 31 July 2013.

It is based on four stages of analysis:

Stage one

A global inventory of more than 400 OER initiatives (Deliverable D2.2) was generated on the basis of the analysis of the following resources:

• 11 country reports and 13 mini country/regional reports produced from POERUP (Deliverable 2.2), http://poerup.referata.com/wiki/Countries.
• OER reports for Brazil, China, Lithuania and Russia, published by UNESCO, http://iite.unesco.org/publications/themes/oer/.
• OER reports produced by other individuals for countries such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and by regional projects such as OER Asia (reports including China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Philippines, Vietnam), http://www.col.org/resources/publications/Pages/detail.aspx?PID=441.
• Case studies produced by OPAL, http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/2085.
• OER case studies from Creative Commons, http://wiki.creativecommons.org/OER_Case_Studies.

Stage two

A list of 120 notable OER initiatives was selected from Step one, by applying a number of criteria:

• To qualify as notable, the OER initiative should focus on producing content, material or resource for teaching and learning. Initiatives whose main focus appeared to be the provision of information, guidance and other services were excluded. For this reason, initiatives such as OPAL and OLnet are not included in this report.
• To be categorised as a notable initiative, Creative Commons licence or other types of open licence must be used for at least a significant amount of content. For this reason, some initiatives which are usually considered as OER initiatives, such as the programme of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (http://nrk.no/skole/) and TED Ed are excluded, as their content is not openly licensed.
• All initiatives whose focus is on producing e-textbooks and making them freely available or at a low cost to students (even the textbooks are not openly licensed) are included as notable initiatives in order to highlight the significance of open textbooks in terms of removing financial barriers to access to educational content.
• MOOCs are currently considered as notable initiatives, even those which are not licensed under CC. They are named as one of the emerging technologies to have an effect on higher education by the 2013 Horizon Report (http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/HR2013.pdf). As the number of MOOCs is increasing rapidly, it is not possible for this report to include every single MOOC that is being offered worldwide. For this reason, we have so far studied the highlights of MOOC initiatives for the purpose of the report. For a complete and up-to-date list of MOOCs, please visit http://www.mooc-list.com/.
• Because the USA dominates the list of worldwide OER initiatives, this report has only included a representative selection, whereas countries with less visible OER have been more broadly represented.

Stage three

A classification scheme was developed, consisting of a number of categories including political scale, educational sector, funding/financing model(s), pedagogical approach, quality procedures, content providers, content users, language of the materials, subjects, formats, licences used, size, and the visible role of OER communities. An inventory was then generated in a spreadsheet in which the 120 initiatives were mapped onto the above categories using the classification scheme.

The complete spreadsheet is shown in section 3 of this report.