Over the summer a couple of the interns we recruited to work at IT Services, University of Oxford have been working with IT Services staff and academic colleagues to create a new website which draws together in one place all of the Oxford massive online open collections (MOOCs), open educational resource (OER) initiatives, open science, open source and open data projects. Oxford began publishing OER in 2009. The work over the last 5 years includes everything from podcasts to crowdsourcing schemes, educational materials to whole digital archives.
You can see them all at openspires.it.ox.ac.uk/
The site serves as an excellent showcase of projects and initatives which have taken a proactive and deliberate approach to openness in line with the University’s mission to maintain and enhance its standing as a university of international reach in teaching, research and knowledge dissemination.
I’ve been really proud to support many of these projects via the OER Service of training and advice in IT Services and of the fact that much of the guidance, training materials and content which IT Services produces is also licenced as OER. It’s important to walk the talk in all parts of the university.
