Producing Open Educational Resources

Our Role at EngSC

We here at EngSC will be next to you every step of the way providing assistance and guidance.

As this is a pilot project we are anticipating some issues and problems to arise along the way. By pooling the
knowledge and experience from all of the partner Institutions we will be able to overcome any of the obstacles we may
encounter along the way.

We are here to help you to deliver excellent resources that will be used and adapted by the Engineering Community at
large. We will be providing useful hints and tips along the to help you achieve this goal.

We will provide:

Support
Support&&
Guidance
Guidance
Best
Best Practice
Practice
Any ––Sharing
Sharing
AnyOther
Other
Assistance Knowledge
Knowledge&&
Assistance
Experience
Experience

HEA
HEA
Appraisal,
Appraisal,QA
QA Engineering
Engineering Promotion
&&Feedback Promotion
Feedback Subject
Subject Services
Services Services
Services Centre
Centre

Metadata
Metadata &&
Cataloguing Copyright
Copyright &&
Cataloguing
Services IPR
IPRAdvice
Advice
Services

Technical
Technical
Assistance
Assistance
If there are any issues you are having with any of the above points or related matters please do not hesitate to contact;

Rob Pearce, Project Manager

rob@engsc.ac.uk
01509 227171

Or

Alex Fenlon, Information Assistant

a.o.fenlon@lboro.ac.uk
01509 227192

JorumOPEN http://www.jorum.ac.uk/deposit/index.html

You can find useful information at various locations online;

Our website:
http://www.engsc.ac.uk/an/oer-project/oer-project.asp

Our project blog;

http://engscoerproject.ning.com/

On Twitter, searching:
#UKOER, hea_engsc & AFENOER

For Legal assistance see;

http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk/Default.aspx?tabid=463
http://www.web2rights.org.uk/
http://www.copyrighttoolkit.com/index.html
http://learn.creativecommons.org/
http://delicious.com/alexfenlon
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/
http://www.youtube.com/user/engineeringsc
http://www.flickr.com/people/22760956@N08/
http://www.slide.com/homeview#-profile

email: enquiries@engsc.ac.uk
web: www.engsc.ac.uk
Tel: 01509 227170
Getting Started
Ok so you’ve have decided you are going to contribute to the OER project by supplying some excellent resources that
will lead to the advancement of the collective pool of human knowledge.

How do you do it and what do you need to do?

Selection of Resources.
Ensure that they are of sufficient quality to reflect your Institution accordingly. There should be some form of QA
involved so that the resources will lead to a benefit for your Institution.

Thought should also be given to the ethos of the Project, i.e. OER revolves around cooperation between Institutions and
reuse of the original materials to create superior resources.

Identification of the Institution’s IP/Copyright Position.

Most University’s have clauses in their contract of employment or ‘Academic Conditions of Service’ saying that any
materials produced in the course of the job will be owned by the Institution.

Confirm that this is the case and therefore that all the materials are free to be used in the project. You may need to
speak to your own copyright officer if you have one, or the legal department. HR may also be a useful contact in order
to look at contracts of employment.

If there are any materials included in the resources that have been created outside of the employment contract,
permission may need to be obtained from the academic. If the academic is using notes from previous posts there could
be issues relating to the ownership of the materials.

You may want to consider advising the academic of the inclusion of their work in the project (see below).

You will also need to consider who will need to sign the Consortium Agreement for your Institution. It could be the Head
of Department or it may need to go higher up depending on the internal policies of the Institution. (At present the
Agreement is being drafted and a copy will be sent in due course. As yet how it is going to be executed is also under
review.)

Third Party Rights.

If the resources selected for the Project contain any third party materials they will need to be clear- i.e. permission
sought to for them to be included.

If the original author/owner of the third party materials cannot be located;

can the materials be replaced or removed?
can replacement OER’s be located?
can CR exceptions be relied upon? (last resort)
have any student materials been included?

If licences/permissions are refused replacement materials will need to be found. If you use third party materials then an
acknowledgement will need to be added to the resource highlighting this. You will need to ensure that the licence is
compatible with the project. If the third party materials are included under licence you need to explicitly mention this
also.

It should also be noted that materials produced by students are normally owned by the students themselves. You will
need to obtain permission from the students to include such materials in the normal way.

email: enquiries@engsc.ac.uk
web: www.engsc.ac.uk
Tel: 01509 227170
Taking points 2 & 3, you may want to consider actually approaching the academic and almost, but not quite, asking their
permission. A letter/email advising that their materials have been selected for the Project and if they have any
objections to contact your office immediately. Obviously it is good to get the academics on board as they may be
involved in editing and reformatting the resources accordingly, so advising them would be a good first step.

Hopefully, as your Institution is already a partner to the Project, cooperation and agreement should be forthcoming, but
it is always good to confirm.

Technical Alterations.
Any materials that are scheduled to be included should under go a further QA at this stage to ensure that the ‘new’
materials are the same or better quality than the original.

This stage may also include format alterations. As the OER project will be including Web2.0 formats you may want to
amend the original resources so that it encapsulates the latest technology and is as interactive and user friendly as
possible. If you are not familiar with multimedia materials and web2.0 technology the team can advise and help you
with this and provide actual assistance in converting videos, animations, importing and exporting etc.

Any acknowledgements and copyright notices should be added to the resources at this stage. If there are third party
rights, the details of those rights need to be clearly identify in this section.

Approval.
When all of the proceeding steps have been completed, a final QA will need to be carried out on the resources as they
are ready to be released.

Once the resources have been completed they will need to be signed off by the appropriate party at the Institution.
(This could be the Head of Department or may be further up.)

You need to ensure that permission has been granted for the materials to be released from the Institution itself. We can
assume that this will just be a formality as your involvement with the project has always meant that the dissemination of
information would always be the final goal. The execution of the Consortium Agreement reaffirms this.

Licence.
Now the resource is ready to be released- the licence documentation or details must be added to it.

A decision has already been made in this particular project that all materials will be released under the most open CC
Attribution licence so as not to impinge on the availability of the resources for future use.

Metadata.
The metadata for the resources will be added by Eng SC when cataloguing the resources. These labels will allow the
resources to be easily accessible and identifiable via the search facility in Google and in JorumOPEN.

Some of the resources provided may be technical in nature and therefore some guidance or advice from may be
required.

In order to assist this process please take some time to consider and advise us on what keywords are most appropriate
to describe the resource e.g.; educational level, previous knowledge required, equipment required (if any), key terms,
etc. 

For example: [electronics, digital telephony, VLSI, RF, signal propagation, integration, differentiation, HND level 6, BEng
year 3, MSc, exam question, coursework, presentation, animation, assignment demonstration]

email: enquiries@engsc.ac.uk
web: www.engsc.ac.uk
Tel: 01509 227170
Credits
This resource was created by the Engineering Subject Centre and released as an open educational
resource through the Open Engineering Resources project of the HE Academy Engineering Subject
Centre. The Open Engineering Resources project was funded by HEFCE and part of the JISC/HE
Academy UKOER programme.

© Loughborough University 2009

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.

The name of Loughborough University and the logo are the name and registered marks of Loughborough University. To
the fullest extent permitted by law Loughborough University reserves all its rights in its name and marks which may not
be used except with its written permission.

The JISC logo is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works
2.0 UK: England & Wales Licence.  All reproductions must comply with the terms of that licence.

The HEA logo is owned by the Higher Education Academy Limited may be freely distributed and copied for educational
purposes only, provided that appropriate acknowledgement is given to the Higher Education Academy as the copyright
holder and original publisher.

email: enquiries@engsc.ac.uk
web: www.engsc.ac.uk
Tel: 01509 227170