Practical approaches to freeing university material stockpiles

Open Educational Resources bring lots of benefits, but how can we implement them in practice? There is no one tool that ticks all the boxes for everyone, but we have produced several documents to help higher education staff make decisions about what to use in their context.

The research project

This began as “Set Them Free! Open Publishing of INF1B Course Materials”, a £2,500 Principal’s Teaching Award Scheme project I proposed in 2022 and led as Principal Investigator from October 2022 to July 2023. I was teaching on Informatics 1B at the time, and the aim was to find a workload-friendly way to share our course materials openly.

I managed a team of four student research assistants on a systematic review of tools for open educational publishing. I then built prototype platforms with the most promising options – Moodle, Open edX, WordPress, and Drupal – evaluated them with student focus groups, and gathered staff feedback. That led us to select Drupal as the technology stack best suited to our department.

I presented our findings at the Edinburgh Learning and Teaching Conference.

Informatics OpenCourse

The research project led on to a Research Assistant role over the summer of 2024, developing the result into a real service. I migrated course content from Blackboard Learn to Drupal using the Learn APIs and custom conversion, thematically analysed staff feedback and student UX testing results, and prioritised what to improve – implementing a new UI theme, file management, and convenience plugins.

Working with the Informatics Learning Technology Service team, we expanded the website from one course to 81 courses across the School of Informatics. It is now Informatics OpenCourse, a department-supported service for open sharing of course materials.

The project is still ongoing and constantly evolving. I am no longer involved in the day-to-day running of the service, though I still occasionally consult with the team about improvements.