WHAT?
Funded by the Tertiary Education Commission, the objective of this OER project is to develop courseware that will be freely available (Creative Commons SA 2.5 license) to all tertiary education institutions in New Zealand . All materials are being developed using a modular approach to best enable customisation, increase the potential for re-use, and lower the cost of maintenance ...more
JUICE?
First, if your country, or your company (or whoever!) is thinking about doing something similar, you can actually quite easily replicate their great initiative from a technology point-of-view. For the infrastructure to support the show-casing and disseminating (and developing) of course materials they are using the open source Moodle environment. When each course is completed, the source files are deposited into a repository system using the open source Fedora system (The Full Story! Read and Learn! I am!). Isn't that wonderful! You don't have to spend a fortune on the software at least.
However, the real juice (to me) from a learning-point-of-view, is of course our freedom to engage (or reuse/adapt/customize/Etc.) with all these wonderful free courseware. And I got to say that there are some really yummy ones already in the showcase area (Which I believe will experience the 'Big Bang' soon! This project is still in its infancy!):
"Not everyone uses Moodle, though. Each course has been built using a modular approach so they can be customised to suit different organisations, whether they are providing a distance learning course or blended learning for on or off-campus students. The aim is that all of the courseware can be easily re-edited, extended or re-designed by the organisation using it. All the course modules have been packaged as IMS Content Packages accessible from searching within this repository. All the source files are also available meaning that your own design teams can modify the materials including the Flash objects that use XML feeds (Source)."
Finally, we have to appreciate and congratulate Richard Wyles (Project Leader) and his team for facilitating and leading such a wonderful project.
Are the any major OER Projects going on in Singapore or Malaysia?
(If they already exist, I apologize for my ignorance!)
Think Fedora! Think Moodle! Or think other great potential open source systems! Think sharing knowledge and ideas! Think connecting people! Think possibilities! Bingo!
If you need any extra help, I will be willing to provide my humble advice and support :)
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