Open Education Global 2022

Many initiatives for adoption of OER start as a project, financed by a one-time grant. Although ambitions may be different, too often the initiative is not continued when the project has ended (Orr et al, 2015). The question what approach leads to a sustainable practice for OER initiatives has ongoing relevance. Several studies are available for addressing the question “Is there still life after the grant?” (Downes, 2007; Tlili et al, 2020). One of the methods is making a professional Community of Practice (CoP) responsible for the quality and timeliness of the OER. Several successful examples are available where the project succeeded in creating a vibrant CoP maintaining an OER collection (Smith & Lee, 2016; Lambert, 2019). But Tlili et al (2020) also observed that many projects do not succeed in this endeavor, ending up with an unmanaged and unused collection of OER.

In 2017, a project was started that should ultimately lead to a situation in which 17 Dutch institutions of higher education with a Bachelor Nursing program create, share and reuse OER. In this project, much attention was given to create a vibrant professional Community of Practice (CoP) to realize a sustainable situation. Two grants were available for the initial period of 3 years. After this period, 11 institutions decided to continue for another five years working towards mainstreaming of OER, with a central role for the CoP.

To gain more insights into how project activities have led to the current situation, and how the role of the CoP in the way towards a sustainable way of sharing and reusing OER has developed, a study is undertaken.

This study analyses how the project has progressed on a national level and what changes this has brought about within the participating institutions. The study answers the following questions:
1. How did the project proceed?
2. Which elements contributed positively to the project result and which did not, and why?
3. What has been the process of teachers adopting sharing and reuse of OER?
4. What lessons can be learned from this project?
5. What advice can be given to the Continuing Together Bachelor Nursing project and to other parties wishing to start a similar project?

In the presentation, the project, method of the study and the results are described.

References
Downes, S. (2007). Models for sustainable open educational resources. Interdisciplinary Journal of e-Skills and Lifelong Learning, 3, 029-044. https://doi.org/10.28945/384
Lambert, S. (2019). The Siyavula case: Digital, collaborative text-book authoring to address educational disadvantage and resource shortage in South African schools. lnternational Electronic Journal of Elementary Education, 11(3), 279-290. https://doi.org/10.26822/iejee.2019349252
Orr, D., M. Rimini and D. Van Damme (2015), Open Educational Resources: A Catalyst for Innovation, Educational Research and Innovation, OECD Publishing, Paris. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264247543-en
Smith, B., & Lee, L. (2016). Librarians and OER: Cultivating a community of practice to be more effective advocates. Journal of Library & Information Services in Distance Learning, 11(1-2), 106-122. https://doi.org/10.1080/1533290x.2016.1226592
Tlili, A., Nascimbeni, F., Burgos, D., Zhang, X., Huang, R., & Chang, T. (2020). The evolution of sustainability models for open educational resources: Insights from the literature and experts. Interactive Learning Environments, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2020.1839507