The UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and The Higher Education Academy have released a new report 'The value of reuse of open educational resources,' which highlights the need to support learners and academic staff alike in the referencing and the reuse of online resources.
Open educational resources (OER) are materials which help educators make the content available online to learners and also to other educators, to share, re-use and remix. The report claims, that their use in teaching offers new and better ways to engage with learning anytime anywhere and raising the richness of the course.
Given the huge volume and diversity of content on the Internet, the report suggests that 'students are often nervous about their ability to critically evaluate ...becoming lost in the web and risk wasting significant amounts of time engaging with resources which prove later to be off topic or unreliable.' The report advises staff to help develop students' digital literacy skills especially in the area of critical analysis of resources.
JISC will be enhancing the knowledge of UK universities and colleges in how to approach open educational resources and technology-enhanced learning through its digital literacies programme and OER work.
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