OpenLearn sets the SCORE

The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) recently announced that it was giving The Open University (OU) £7.8 million from its Strategic Development Fund to enhance its national role. This was announced during the OU’s 40th anniversary celebrations at Downing Street last month with Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.

The Prime Minister said:
'The success of distance learning, pioneered 40 years ago by the Open University, has been nothing short of a revolution for higher education. It has opened the doors to a whole new audience of students who have not only seen academic success but reaped the wider rewards learning brings’.

The HEFCE grant will be used for three projects. Of significant interest to OpenLearn is the Support Centre for Open Resources in Education (SCORE).

SCORE will focus on sharing OU expertise in Open Educational Resources (OER) with other universities. People are increasingly learning using freely available online content on sites such as OpenLearn and social networks. Universities need to harness these networks in order to develop students’ learning. This is where the OU comes in – leading collaborations to develop OER resources and services, as well as to lower course development costs. SCORE will give staff from across the higher education sector the opportunity to work with experienced Open University staff on developing and using open educational resources.

Professor Andy Lane, Director of OpenLearn commented that
‘Open educational resources involve sharing knowledge between teachers and with learners and that involves much collaboration and cooperation’.

Jonathan Darby, Project Director of the OU National Role Programme said it was ’Essentially setting up a national centre to provide a focus for the development of the Open Educational Resources community within higher education; to promote good practice - to provide opportunities for others to engage with us in the development of the whole field’.

In addition, the OU is collaborating with Carnegie Mellon University to research open learning networks (OLnet) and works alongside the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) on their own OER programme. JISC has also funded another project, POCKET, which has already established a pilot network of universities collaborating over OERs.

The other two projects funded by the HEFCE grant are Shared Returns, an initiative to decrease student dropout from universities and an Academic Partnership Hub, enabling greater flexibility in the HE sector.