The OER Service in 2025
2025 was an interesting year for the OER Service, especially with the range of new queries that arose from increased use of Generative AI tools across numerous new technologies, tools and services. Ewan and Lorna started the year with insightful blog posts on the rise of Gen AI use:
Wikipedia at 24: Wikipedia and Artificial Intelligence
Copyright and cartoon mice – Gen AI images and the public domain
We spoke to many staff and students throughout the year on where and how Gen AI does and does not fit in the creation and use of OER. Including a collaborative presentation with colleagues from Academic Library Support and Digital Skills for the MSc Digital Education. And there were enough concerns about it in Canva that Charlie wrote a blog post with guidance to support our staff and students:
Creating OERs & Canva Gen AI Features
In January the OER ‘Sustainable Schools – An IDL STEM design challenge’ was chosen to feature in TES Resources hand-picked collection of Popular Stem projects for secondary, a selection of cross-curricular investigations and activities to inspire pupils to work together and think creatively:
Sustainable Schools – An IDL STEM design challenge
We were invited to speak at the ‘UKSG OER online seminar 2025’ about our integration of OER at the University of Edinburgh:
Open for Good: Strategic support for OER at the University of Edinburgh
Sanika Prakash joined us as a summer intern and then had her internship extended through to the end of the ’25 academic year to continue to assist with prototyping an Open Textbook Creation service:
And to top it all off, we added 52 new OER pages to our showcase.
Highlights include:
Eight new OER made by our Geoscience Outreach undergraduate students!
Three OER made by postgraduate students on the Digital Futures course for the MSc in Digital Education!
The 2nd edition of Wikimedia UK’s booklet of case studies of ‘Wikimedia in Education’!
Digital Sustainability: three videos on Digital Sustainability created out of the Green Digital Design internships with the Website and Communications digital and design service!
British Sign Language for Healthcare, a series of videos in which Leah Fransisco, introduces basic British Sign Language for use in healthcare settings!
The Indian Primer, by John Eliot (1669), digitised into 137 high resolution images by our Digital Imaging Unit within The University of Edinburgh Library and Collections!
The Scottish National War Memorial collection of films and stories, part of a collaborative project between the Scottish National War Memorial at Edinburgh Castle and Moray House History Education!
‘AI in Scottish Schools A Showcase of Resources for Primary & Secondary Teachers’, a collaborative event to raise awareness of the range of resources available to Primary and Secondary teachers in Scotland which explore Artificial Intelligence!
Links to mentioned resources
British Sign Language for Healthcare
Scottish National War Memorial
AI in Scottish Schools A Showcase of Resources for Primary & Secondary Teachers
Header image: Photo of Green and Brown Bird Flying Over Body of Water With Catch On Its Beak, by Andrew Mckie Pexels free licence.
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