referendum on Scottish independence (Libby Brooks, 2014). This was also the year that the students’ association encouraged the University’s senior managers to explore how learning materials could be made open, not only for students within the university but across Scotland and the wider world. Student engagement and co-creation have been fundamental aspects of open education resources (OERs) work at the University of Edinburgh ever since.
Open Edinburgh
The University’s OER vision, championed by Assistant Principal for Online Learning, Dr. Melissa Highton, sought to meet the modern-day challenges the university faced in terms of scale, sustainability, and reuse. This vision was backed by an OER policy (approved by the Senate Learning and Teaching Committee in 2015) which articulates that the creation of open knowledge and open educational resources is fully in keeping with the institutional vision, purpose and values—“to discover knowledge and make the world a better place, while ensuring that our teaching and research is diverse, inclusive, accessible to all and relevant to society” (About – Open.Ed, 2016). To implement the OER policy, a new OER Service was created to help advise and support academic colleagues, along with the role of Wikimedian-in-Residence, to further embed open practice at the university.
“You Can’t Afford Not To”
The value proposition for the new OER policy had to be something that senior managers could say “yes” to. One of the most compelling reasons for investing in open educational resources at the institutional level is the concept of “copyright debt” (Highton, 2015). This concept looked at creating and using OERs as an important way to ensure longevity of access to course materials, which can benefit staff, students and the university itself. The reason being that if you don’t get the licensing right first-time round, it will cost more to fix it further down
