This page documents the stage of "reflecting and reviewing" in the process of working with teaching materials.

In line with our iterative project methodology, focusing on communities of practice principles, the project core team devised a peer supported review exercise. We paired up the partners and asked them to review a sample module from the other partner’s contributed materials, focusing on issues relevant to OERs/ reusability. The pairings were made on the basis of overlaps in partners' discipline/ pedagogic approach/ topics covered. This review was based around a checklist and series of prompts:

• What is your understanding of the key terms employed in this project – such as OERs, reusability or “sharing resources”? There are some well-established definitions, of course, and the project initiation document states the working definitions - however, how do you use these terms in the context of your own teaching practice?

• What major issues with regard to re-usability can you identify? For instance, during discussions within the project team, we commented on the fact that a lot of teaching materials we received are embedded in the context of a particular institution and rely on implicit pedagogic assumptions, but your take on that issue might be different.

• How would you explain the design of your module to somebody who wanted to teach your module? Most of you seem to be following the route of module handbook together with presentation slides and any additional resources, why do you think this approach is so prevalent? If you have adopted a different format, why?

• What sort of contextual information does your teaching material contain – within the project team we identified a lot of “housekeeping information”, for instance references to material on WebCT, arrangements for exams etc. – how should this information be handled when preparing the material for release as OER?

• What influenced your decision as to the format of the assessment? How transferable is your assessment strategy to anyone else using your material?

• How would you like this module to be taught (imagine as many different potential audiences as possible)? What if the material was to be picked up by a colleague at your own institution? Another UK institution? A colleague outside of the UK – how would these different end users change your thinking about the material and the ways in which it could be re-used?

• A lot of you use images in your materials – apart from obvious issues with copyright, what other issues can you identify with regard to repurposing? How did you decide on using those particular images – and how do you see their pedagogic purpose?

• Having read the wiki pages on the toolkit (including reflections of some of project partners), what sort of toolkit would you like to see emerging from the project? What is your “ideal” toolkit – imagine that there are no financial/software restrictions- what ideal features would you like to see? What sort of toolkit would be most helpful for your own teaching practice?

Overall, these prompts provided a fascinating insight into an exchange of ideas around practice, all of which was cumulative towards our thinking in terms of creating a ‘mapping’ framework which can help to expose and reveal pedagogical decisions about using the materials.

You can find more detailed instructions for the development activity here and read the reflexive narratives here.