Fostering OER Communities of Practice with Teachers

Abstract

The focus of this chapter is on “key issues for fostering OER communities of practice with teachers.” It is based on the successful experiences of three European funded projects: SLOOP, TENEGEN, and SLOOP2DESC. These three projects draw on the concept of open education as well as on the open and free software movements. The original idea behind the three projects was that teachers can build learning objects in conjunction with software specialists who are developing open software packages: each teacher can contribute to the development phase, as well as repurposing the learning objects to meet her/his specific needs, thus working in a collaborative environment. In order to enable this collaborative production and reuse of learning objects, the authors have introduced the Open Learning Object or OpenLO model, which combines the benefits of the learning object paradigm with the ‘Openness’ concept characterized by Web 2.0 approaches to knowledge building and sharing.