OLnet What is it and how might you use it?

OLnet – the Open Learning network is a website dedicated to Open Educational Resources, so what can it offer educators in relation to their practice?

Firstly, this in not one tool, as the Technology Enhanced Learning Research Programme (2013) explains, TEL (Technology Enhanced Learning) is complex and is characterised as a bricolage,

a productive and creative innovation process that involves bringing together and adapting technologies and pedagogies, experimentation to generate further insights and a willingness to engage with local communities and practices.

(TECHNOLOGY ENHANCED LEARNING RESEARCH PROGRAMME, 2013, p7)

Hosted via Moodle, the website acts as a receptacle for numerous devices embedded within it, these support different aspects of practice namely:

• Compendium and Compendium LD. These tools offer frameworks to support practitioners with the learning design element of creating OERs (Open Educational Resources).
• Cloudworks, Evidence Hub and Cohere. These tools assist researchers in their understanding of how OERs are developing; providing examples in practice and using Scoopit, collates a worldwide map of contributors to OER projects.
• Openlearn, Labspace and the Open learning initiative. These searchable resource intensive websites house OERs themselves and offer a wide range of open source learning content in multiple disciplines.

Returning to previous discussions of innovation, could this site be considered innovative? Using the model and criteria applied previously, yes it could be described as innovative. From the discussion above we can see that it contains devices and curricula that are up-to-date and change our perspective of education. Underpinned by study and research it provides a space where educators from different disciplines are able to work together. However, innovation is also defined by process and OLnet provides that too, an example of which is demonstrated using the Compendium tool below.