The VitalSource Resource

With a number of different organisations offering a plethora of OER content, the sheer amount of choice can often be overwhelming. The OER Commons alone “provides a single point of access for over 30,000 items.” OER can also come in many forms: complete courses, single modules, textbooks, or even podcasts and videos. So where is the best place to start?

 In 2002, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) first adopted the term open educational resources (OER), setting the scene for the learning landscape to embrace the reusing, revising, remixing, and redistributing of content. But in 2019, the use of OER in the UK is still very much localised, relying on specific projects for support.

“So far there is no long-term decision or reciprocal deal on how UK students in the EU, or EU students in the UK, will be treated post-Brexit.” With the future of the United Kingdom’s position in the European Union still unclear, institutions and professional bodies are speculating on the impact leaving the EU may have on widening participation efforts, particularly in terms of economic slowdown.

In the first piece of our change management series, we discussed how to overcome factors that may be causing resistance in your institution during the transition to digital. One of the key underlying takeaways of which was maintaining strong lines of communication.

Findings from the Higher Education Statistics Agency released in February 2019 show that the percentage of full-time first degree students coming from state schools in the UK dropped in the 2017–2018 academic year. The decrease from 90% to 89.8% sees the first dip in this number for eight years.