Pocketing the Difference: Joint Development of Open Educational Resources

Web 2.0 tools and social software are changing the way in which formal and informal learners expect to work with learning resources. In response, educational providers may open up access to existing courses by providing them as free to use open educational resources (OERs). The OpenLearn initiative of The Open University established a "LearningSpace" for learners to access OERs from the university and built up methods and processes for transforming material. OpenLearn also established a ldquoLabSpacerdquo to allow others to make changes to released content, or to provide new examples. A parallel project, POCKET, works with partner universities to transfer the model of production from OpenLearn and provide content from those universities for open use. In this paper we outline the issues that we have identified in our production process and the intended way to transfer this process to our partner institutions and then to others.