Feature: Open education resources
OERs: the future of education?
The pandemic has provided a tantalising glimpse of the potential of open educational resources. Rebecca Pool asks: will these freely-accessible learning materials become our new normal?
When University College London launched UCL Press in 2015, the library services team wanted the open access university press to become the OA publisher of choice for authors, editors and readers around the world. Six years, 180 research monographs and more than four million downloads later, the press has, without a doubt, been embraced by many. Paul Ayris, pro-vice provost and director of UCL Library Services, tells Research Information: ‘With only 180 books, we’ve reached more than 240 countries and territories across the world... as the UK’s first fully open access university press, we’ve seen the impact the press has had.’ Over this time, one of the top 10
downloads has been an e-textbook on burns and plastic surgery produced by Deepak Kalaskar, from Medical Sciences at UCL, and director of the MSc course in burns, plastic and reconstructive surgery. According to Ayris, the book’s 70,000 downloads are proof that e-textbooks and open educational resources have a clear future at UCL, a point that’s only been underlined by the current pandemic. ‘UCL has now given us funding to
produce an e-textbook service,’ he says. ‘We have 45,000 students at UCL, and when the libraries physically closed and students couldn’t get access to physical copies... we saw that digital education and
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providing open educational materials was the way to go. ‘I wouldn’t have said that 12 months ago, but I’m saying it now,’ he adds. Right now, UCL is piloting an open
access repository, UCL Discovery, for its open educational resources, has established its online publication platform, BOOC (Books as Open Online Content) for OA ebooks and content, and expects to start its dedicated e-textbook service in a year. Work is underway to explore whether this service will have its own dedicated platform or UCL Discovery will disseminate content, with consultants also looking at the best workflows and OA business models. But whatever the outcome one year from now, Ayris is excited.
“When academics learn how ‘ruinously expensive’ e-textbooks are for students, they suddenly become very interested in alternatives”
‘We’re still in the advocacy stage of OERs and are encouraging lecturers to use our platform but we’ve had one or two expressions of interest from other universities that want to join us with this,’ he said. ‘I don’t know of any other university in Europe that is building an OER e-textbook platform.’ Given the current industry row over
e-textbook pricing, this can’t come a moment too soon for Ayris. In his words, when academics learn how ‘ruinously expensive’ e-textbooks are for students, they suddenly become very interested in the alternatives. ‘This is a critical moment in the
development of OERs, as we’ve seen in the last 12 months that current models and provision just don’t cut it with students or universities either,’ he said. ‘Indeed, when I took the latest bill for our commercial interests with purchasing to the Provost and Dean’s faculty, they were outraged.’ Like many across the scholarly
community, David Prosser, executive director of Research Libraries UK, is watching OER developments from UCL and elsewhere with great interest. And in a similar vein to Ayris, he believes the pandemic has triggered change. ‘[Coronavirus] has acted as a real
catalyst for OERs, especially with many institutions that, quite frankly, have had
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