Abstract

POCKET brought together three core partner institutions to investigate the potential of creating Open Educational Resources, across a range of subject areas, to help support independent learners and also offer potential learners access to taster learning material. POCKET also investigated and identified the barriers to Open Content production within the partner HEI’s, and this report presents some solutions to help overcome these. The project team worked with academic subject specialists to create self contained learning “units”, which were posted to a global audience via the Open University’s Open Learn platform. The materials published by POCKET are all stand-alone, that is to say there will be no dependencies on other materials. This independence will be important for ensuring they are relevant both to individual learners who discover them following a search and to course creators who require resources that can be used in a variety of contexts These units could then be viewed and repurposed amongst the academic and wider community, widening participation and creating awareness of the range of courses offered by the partner institutions.