Open educational resources and practices for all: thoughts captured during, and shortly after, a short-term SCORE Fellowship

OER: What is it? Let me start from the yummy strawberry and the motivational poster image created at http://diy.despair.com/ using a quote shared by Salma Siddique, a colleague from Edinburgh Napier University. The photograph was taken by me and has been uploaded to yummy strawberry poster is hanging on my office door, and I have shared it with a few others but before I finish writing this article and soon after I have completed my short term SCORE Fellowship at the Support Centre for Open Resources in Education of the Open University, I will share the photograph with a wider audience under 1 of the 6 Creative Commons Licences (see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/). For me, Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Educational Practices (OEP) are about openness and sharing within and beyond institutional boundaries; about having access to editable resources via open-access repositories; creating resources and programmes with others using open-source and open access-digital tools and social media, and acknowledging contributions under Creative Commons. In a way OER and OEP are about re-using, reworking , re-mixing and redistributing by working together without trying to re-invent the wheel. Are they time-savers too and enable tutors to focus on facilitating learning? And do or should they engage learners more actively with content? Something to think about. The OER movement, educational opportunities for all, is a philosophy of freely sharing content and resources in digital format now that this is possible through the available technology (see OER timeline at http://wikieducator.org/OER_timeline). However, the concept and practice of humans sharing ideas, stories, resources in everyday life as well as in education, formal and informal learning isn't new. The difference today is that technology has the potential to lead to the massification of sharing. Contextualising OER I see value in creating and using OERs in all disciplines and professional areas (for OER on-the-go, try the OER search app available at importance of sharing and collaboration which enables us all to grow, to move forward and to create even greater things. Too often though, we focus on the product. We learn so much through the process and this is why I would suggest that there is value in developing OERs in partnership with colleagues and students. Academic Developers are agents of and for change. In our job, it is extremely important to model good