Designing Higher Education courses using Open Educational Resources

Utilising the benefits of web 2 applications allows greater interaction than has previously been possible in online education—between the tutor and students, between the students, and between all participants in the selection of core learning resources. When approached with a positive perspective this enables participants to utilise new ways of constructing knowledge relating to learning activities and then to share these resources with a wider range of people over a longer time frame. It permits structured high-quality educational experiences outwith the normal framework of higher education institutions, yet it enables institutions the flexibility to embed this “disruptive technology” within their own ICT systems. This form of design requires the educationalist to re-think the process of course design in a more flexible format than has previously been common. Part of this flexibility comes from re-using existing educational resources—web pages, journal articles, video and audio clips etc.—rather than being required to re-invent courses on every subject area from the scratch. This chapter describes our experiences of designing different models of higher education courses using open educational resources (OER) and proposes a theoretical framework for the democratisation of education through inter-institutional sharing of the different stages of design and delivery of university courses.