News Story

Open Educational Practice – making best use of free resources

Teresa Connolly, Tuesday 31 Jan 2012

Teresa Connolly recently delivered two workshops at an Open Education Resources (OER) event in Leicester for the National Institute for Adult and Continuing Education (NIACE): “Open Educational Practice – making best use of free resources”.

Attendees soon became immersed in the imaginary world of OERopoly, a game that raises awareness about OER and encourages collaborative learning. In the spirit of openness some of the participants requested copies of the board game and associated project cards in order that they might replicate their enjoyable experience with their own colleagues and students elsewhere in the UK.

This is the seventh occasion at which OERopoly has been used in this way. Previous events have included workshops at the OpenEd ’10 conference in Barcelona, the OER ’11 conference in Manchester, and the Open CourseWare Consortium international OCWC ’11 conference in Boston. In addition the game has been used at various Support Centre for Open Educational Resources (SCORE) Short Term Fellowship events in the Open University. A workshop is also scheduled for the forthcoming joint SCORE and OCWC “Cambridge 2012” conference 16-18 April at Queen’s College, Cambridge.

A number of publications describing the use of the OERopoly game are available including a chapter in the forthcoming book: “Collaborative Learning 2.0: Open Educational Resources”, edited by Ale Okada, Teresa Connolly and Peter Scott, to be published April 2012.