The Online Course Production Service, with support from the OER Service, has received a Social Responsibility and Sustainability Changemaker Award for increasing the accessibility and sustainability of educational materials, offering opportunities for individuals to learn about issues such as climate change.

During 2022 the Online Course Production Service, a multidisciplinary team of instructional designers, open education specialists, media producers and marketers worked together with the Open Educational Resources (OER) Service to ensure the sustainability of over 1200 high quality media resources, by adding them to the Open Media Bank on Media Hopper Create to make them freely and openly available to the world. These media resources were created for the University’s MOOCs and free short online courses and have been shared under Creative Commons licence to ensure they are open, sustainable, and accessible to learners and teachers, ensuring they are not locked into our MOOC partners’ platforms.

The Open Media Bank is underpinned by the University’s Open Educational Resources (OER) Policy and strategic vision to share knowledge and make the world a better place. As a world leader in digital education, we are committed to community outreach, knowledge exchange and widening access to high quality online learning opportunities through open courses and OER. The University’s commitment to open educational resources is in line with the UNESCO recommendation on OER, which highlights the important role that OER can play in achieving the aims of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, particularly global goal 4 for Quality Education.

Each piece of media in the Open Media Bank has been reviewed by the Online Course Production Service, with support from the OER Service, to understand any licencing constraints and ensure both current and legacy resources can be freely shared under Creative Commons licence. To help maximise the potential of this fantastic collection, we have created a video resource to help users to understand how they can share, reuse and remix this content.

In addition, we have also started to share stock footage through the Open Stock Media Footage channel on Media Hopper Create, and on Pexels, to bring it to the widest possible audience.

This commitment to creating and sharing open licensed digital media has been built into our online course production workflow to ensure that the learning resources we create are sustainable, reusable, and open by default. At the same time, we work to educate and inspire others to create open media and learning materials and share them with the world under Creative Commons licence. With over 1,200 open licensed videos, featuring academics, guest speakers and experts discussing everything from philosophy, history and music to medicine, data, and climate change, the Open Media Bank represents a significant and sustainable contribution to the global knowledge commons.

Online Course Production Service