Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Welcome to the project site of the Jisc Interactive Learning Resources for Skills project. At the end of 2014 we commissioned 22 training providers to create open educational resources for a wide range of vocational areas. The commissioned organisations are all funded by the Skills Funding Agency to provide training for apprentices in England. They are listed, with a brief description of their projects, and direct links to the content where available, on the right-hand side of every page of this site. Each commissioned organisation has had a mentor from the project team. Mentors are looking after five to seven organisations, encouraging networking and learning on all sides. Some organisations have written blogs describing their own learning journeys during the course of the project.

I’m feeling a tad glum about MOOCs. It seems like so much of what we’ve learned about open online learning materials since UNESCO coined the term OER (Open Educational Resources) in 2002 is in danger of being lost, forgotten or ignored. I was reading recently Sir John Daniels’ concern around the lack of open licensing in their MOOCs, and this same issue came up at the inaugural Libraries and MOOCs conference organised by the Open University Library in partnership with OCLC Research and Jisc. My question to that audience was ‘if OER can help with developing MOOCs why aren’t we capitalising on all the investment that has already been put into this already?’