C-SAP Open Educational Resources Project

Evaluating the Practice of Opening up Resources for Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences

The C-SAP project took place between April 2009-April 2010 and was part of UK-wide Open Educational Resources programme [UKOER]. Within the programme, JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and the Higher Education Academy were collaborating on the with the aim of enabling higher education institutions, consortia and individuals to share learning materials freely online. The programme supports universities and colleges in exploring processes and policies, intellectual property rights, cultural issues, technical requirements and data management issues. The C-SAP project has adopted a critical social science perspective on the processes of sharing digital educational resources, as well as related challenges. The project team has endeavoured to explore ways of making educational resources more “open” and less reliant on tacit pedagogic practice by using insights gained from the process of peer review and social science knowledge production.

Within this website you will find a range of resources, which were developed as part of the project rationale (see about the project for more details). These inlcude:

case studies compiled by our project partners, reflecting on insights into their practice (of using open resources and more broadly module design and pedagogic issues), derived from their participation in the project;
video narratives to accompany the case studies;
an online demonstrator version of the project toolkit, used to map out and diagnose modular approaches to OER suitable for re-use in social science curricula;
module mappings within the toolkit (22 from the pilot project) from the project partners, which can be explored(containing links to source materials in JORUM Open);
a zipped stand-alone version of the toolkit, available for download and installation on a local PC (allowing the mapping files to be opened, edited, and saved locally);
other resources from the project including a literature review and overview of pedagogic approaches to OER (with links to the project's supporting wiki).

We hope that the resources available, produced as on outcome of our pilot project, will offer practitioners the opportunity to explore their understanding of 'open' educational resources. Although these tools were created under the aegis of a pilot programme, we also hope that they offer a stable base for enhancing the range of 'open' module mappings available. We encourage anyone to use the tool for their own needs, with the guidance provided, and with the understanding that as a beta tool there may be minor issues with functionality on different platforms.