#319 Poster

Monday 16 April 15:00 - 17:15 Bar/Conservatory

The OERtest Clearing House

Rosana Montes, Ignacio Blanco, Jose Ma de Cordoba, Antonio Bailón, University of Granada , Spain

Conference Theme: Collaboration

Summary: The clearinghouse will be a significant source for high quality OER and a case-study of the services that HEIs can provide

Abstract: In this paper we introduce the OERtest European project and one of its expected results: the OERtest Clearing House. The Clearing House is a significant constantly and automatically updated source, for high quality OER courses based with a European ‘heritage’. As such it will serve as a valuable education resource, but also as a case-study in itself of the benefits and services which OER can provide to Higher Educational Institutions, lifelong learners and society in general. The portal is set up in the form of meta-aggregator, populating it with feeds of complete OER modules from participating institutions' repositories. This repository does not intend to duplicate existing content but to gather initiatives of the same level of description and assessment regimentations. Those OER based modules linked through the Clearing House are those that apply to a standard of quality that serves to a mayor objective: the provision of OER course based certification within European high educational institutions. We expose the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of a tool such as the Clearing House together with its use. In the future, this tool will serve to visualize the participant institutions of the OER Euro Network, a consortium of HEI committed with the assessment, certification and recognition service to the society.
The conversion of Europe into a knowledge/innovation society is challenging the mission of every HEI in Europe. Advocates of Open Educational Resources promote them as a potential tool which can contribute towards:

• solving stresses due to unparalleled massification of education
• recognition of the university as a stakeholder within wider society
• refocus the provision of knowledge increasingly towards science & technology
• ensure equity and efficiency in access, progression and completion across its activities

The alleviation of all these problems, through the simple mechanism of providing open and free knowledge to the masses constitute the seed of the OERtest project, an initiative of two years funded by the European Commission. However, the realities of the knowledge economy require not only the provision of knowledge, but also of training on how to utilise the knowledge and how to assess such skills and knowledge against pre-determined learning outcomes. Neither of these has been a strength of the OER movement, and the lack of them has limited the benefit of OER as a ‘serious’ educational tool.
The participating institutions of the OERtest project hypothesise that the belief in the potential benefits of OER is not misplaced and a contribution towards all the challenges mentioned above can indeed be made  with the development of a proper framework which can integrate OER in an appropriate place within mainstream Higher Education provision. The establishment of a European OER Clearing House/repository becomes an essential tool for the project.
We have found that the number of OER based material is increasingly high, but this also means that content is wide spread and not easily found in a centralized way. Setting up the Clearing House is an ambitious task. The Clearing House is not a new repository but rather a meta-aggregator that links existing institutional repositories. It gives access to open content from Higher Education institutions who understand the importance of the OCW / OER movement and are willing to make a step further: the use of an assessment framework in a economic feasibility way to accomplish the set up of an accreditation mechanism. Certification services could constitute a source of revenue for universities, while the contents are offered for free. This idea will become crucial in the following future.
We should focus on opening the assessment regulation, rather than on the resources (resources are already there). In the OERtest project we move to the possibility of universities publishing courses as OER and also certifying students, maybe awarding ECTS. In addition, the project intends to contribute in its own way to improve the availability of Euro-OER content online, by specifying that the OER- Clearing House to be developed in the project will favour and particularly promote content with a 'European heritage'. Initial content is populated by the participating institutions though we foresee the establishment of collaboration with other HE institutions to promote and follow the development of OER and Open Educational Practices within the EHEA.
The existence of the OER Clearing House will enable us to build a semi-formal cooperation network of HEIs interested in OER, who agree to pool expertise and resources for future collaboration around the topic, and who will use the OER Clearing House established during the lifetime of this project as their meeting centre. It is envisaged that the grouping would be formalised through a memorandum of understanding.