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" Project Start Date: 2006 A wide range of individuals and organizations are actively involved in the development of free-to-use open educational resources (OER). Because the field is so new, there have been few opportunities to share learnings and advances across projects and boundaries. Little is known, for example, about how projects are facilitating the adaptation of open content by diverse users, what structures they are instilling to support peer production, and how they are attempting to inspire community engagement. Our Role: ISKME has worked with six projects to help them build capacity to track, analyze and share key developments in open educational resources (OER), and in the practices and models that play a role in project sustainability. The aim was to enable projects to discover unknown or untapped potential, to facilitate decision making around which practices to change or maintain, and to learn how other OER projects have overcome similar challenges. In addition, it sought to advance the field at large by contributing new knowledge on which others can build. The participating OER projects include: * CurriculumNet (Uganda) * Curriki (United States) * Free High School Science Texts (South Africa) * Mission 2007 Training Commons (India) * Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (United States) * Teachers' Domain (United States) "

What are the Key Challenges for the OER Movement?   With the great support of Rob Farrow we were able to put together a first draft of 10 key challenges. Our aim is to come out, by this Friday (14 Oct) , with a final list of key challenges to add to the Evidence Hub (EH). These challenges will be used as "Higher Level Questions" that we present to the community and under which we would like to cluster the community generated challenges/issues. This means that every time a user will add a new challenge/issue to the EH he will have the option to say to what "key challenge" it is related to. Another objective of this exercise is also to offer some key "entry points" for new users to explore the Evidence Hub contents.

"with OER comes a few key professional development challenges. The vast quantity of resources--tested and untested alike--available online is one key hurdle. Helping instructors develop a mindset around "constant revision" and encouraging ongoing open course development are two other tricky areas that can make or break an institution's OER initiative."

S. New Hampshire U's new Innovation Lab is focusing on becoming a leader in OER; member of OERu Bell [leader of Lab] stated, "Our alliance with the OERu is the first step towards our formal charge to develop a truly disruptive model that challenges the culture of a closed, proprietary education system,"

"The Community College Open Textbook Project (CCOTP) was developed to support the use of textbooks that are freely available and accessible online, and that can be adapted by teachers and learners to meet their unique needs and contexts. This article presents the findings of a research study conducted by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management of Education (ISKME) on CCOTP. The study examined the adoption and use patterns of teachers and learners as end users of open textbooks, finding that important initial drivers of use included reduced cost, dependable quality and ease of use, and that teachers and learners use open textbooks in ways that reflect their existing teaching and learning practices. The study also showed the potential for new teaching and learning behaviours aligned to the use of open textbooks, including increased teacher collaboration on curriculum development and the interactivity of open materials as an enhancement of student learning. In addition, the study identified challenges for the sustainability of the open textbook model, including teacher technological efficacy and professional development that supports open textbook use."

"he Evidence Hub seeks to distill key insights from the cloud of discussion and opinion, to create a thematically indexed, structured web of Challenges, Solutions and Evidence, and the organizations and projects who form the Open Education movement."