I enjoyed Tuesday’s Elluminate session, OER across sectors. It was interesting to hear from those offering HE in FE and some of the cultural differences between the FE and HE sector, even within the same institution. Thanks to Lou McGill (speaking to Terry McAndrew’s slides), Helen Richardson, Anna Gruszczynska and Yolande Knight.
With our own project’s focus on supporting Continuous Professional Development (CPD) and learning in the workplace I think there is much we can learn from the FE sector, which appears much more responsive to employer needs. Being based at Plymouth we are fortunate to be able to draw on the experience of our University of Plymouth Colleges faculty, which Yolande referred to in her presentation. I also want to explore the Excellence Gateway resources.
Some of the things that I took from the session:
- As as project we can learn from the FE experience about employer engagement
- The Excellence Gateway resources ( http://www.excellencegateway.org.uk) introduced by Chris Kelland look really interesting and worth further exploration.
- Some of the issues facing FE in relation to the production of OERs are identical to HE – e.g. limited time to create / repurpose OER; limited skills set for re-purposing OER; and limited knowledge with regard to IPR
- I thought the notion of valuing OER publication, as a substitute for research publication an interesting notion but doubt it is likely to be widely supported in HE
