#oer Universities and Open Education in Scotland

Last week I did a short session in a Scottish University with the head of departments around the challenges and the opportunities around open education.

I did not touch much on massive open on-line courses as in many ways for this and other institutions this could be a step too far. I highlighted that they could do much more by simply opening up more of what they do to the communities they touch already and by doing more to harness the staff resource that they have by encouraging much more open practice across the institution .  This could be the precursor to some MOOCs at a later stage but in the short term it would get academics thinking about how they become open practitioners .

I'll stick up my presentation here when I  get back into the office . I borrowed many of my slides from previous presentations on open education. I spoke about past and current developments in Scotland 

The rest of the afternoon comprised of some excellent presentations from the library and learning resource staff. They are actually well on the way to developing open policies that will permit much more open practices . This is probably the right response from institutions who don't have massive marketing budgets to invest in the development and the staffing of massive online courses. It was good to hear that many of the academics already knew and used resources from services like JORUM the challenge is that none of them had ever deposited a learning resource there.

I hope that the new programme from the funding council led by OU Scotland , Edinburgh , Glasgow and University of Highland and Islands will make its focus - not the creation of massive open on-line courses that may prove hard to sustain  but the creation of an open culture that encourages open practices and the sharing on on-line content.