Congratulations to Eden Swimer, winner of the Staff Student Member of the Year Award at the 2024 ISG Staff Recognition Awards. Eden was employed by the OER Service in 2023 to help organise and run our Digital Collection Day as part of the University of Oxford’s Their Finest Hour project, which aimed to collect and […]

We’re delighted that Their Finest Hour has been shortlisted for two ISG Recognition Awards.  The project team have been shortlisted for the ISG in the Community Award for outstanding contributions to ISG and commitment to the University’s values.  In addition, Eden has been shortlisted for Student Staff Member of the Year Award. Gavin McLachlan, Vice-Principal […]

In July 2023, I began working on Their Finest Hour, my internship, I was initially told, would last six months. Yet, I am now clocking off, one year later, after continuous exciting and rewarding work on the project. The last year has involved a huge variety of challenges. Organising the collection day itself involved events […]

Over the last few months, I have been working on an Open Educational Resource (OER) based on Their Finest Hour and stories and objects collected during the Digital Collection Day in Edinburgh. The OER, Recording Everyday Social History, which is aimed at the second and third levels of the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence (age range […]

Last week the OER24 Conference took place at the Munster Technological University in Cork and I was privileged to go along with our OER Service intern Mayu Ishimoto.  The themes of this year’s conference were:  Open Education Landscape and Transformation Equity and Inclusion in OER Open Source and Scholarly Engagement Ethical Dimensions of Generative AI […]

This week I’m looking forward to traveling to Cork with OER Service intern Mayu Ishimoto for the OER24 Conference. The conference is being hosted by the Munster Institute of Technology this year and chaired by the Gearóid Ó Súilleabháin and Tom Farrelly.  The theme this year is digital transformation in education and Mayu and I […]

The upload stage of Edinburgh’s Their Finest Hour project has begun! After collecting over fifty testimonies, and thousands of photographs of WW2-related objects at the collection day, we are now working through the stories and photos, and uploading them to Oxford’s online archive that will launch in June. While we do this, we’re keeping a […]

How to respond to the affordances and challenges of generative AI is a pressing issue that many learning technologists and open education practitioners are grappling with right now and I’ve been wanting to write a blog post about the interface between AI, large language models and the Commons for some time. This isn’t that post.  […]

I’m a bit late with this OER23 reflection, it’s taken me a couple of weeks to catch up with myself and to let some of the ideas generated by the conference percolate.   It was fabulous to see the OER Conference returning to Scotland for the fist time since we hosted it at the University of […]

The Instructional Design Team have just completed a project with the OER (Open Educational Resources) Service which, as all good projects do, started with a mysterious old dusty spreadsheet. It was a record of legacy MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) that had been developed over the years; MOOCs that hadn’t been through the robust processes […]