IITE staff member Dr. Svetlana Knyazeva was awarded an expert fellowship by the Open Learning Network (OLnet) based at Open University UK in Milton Keynes.
The main objective of study to be undertaken within the fellowship is to ensure the sustainability of a project launched by the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education. The project is aimed at promoting Russian-language open educational resources and will include exploring policy options, identifying needs and opportunities, as well as capacity-building in the production and use of OER in CIS countries. The proposed research will be focused on the examination of three major problems concerned with the production and use of OER:
- quality;
- the effectiveness of use; and
- copyright and open content licensing, as applied to the copyright laws existing in Russia/CIS.
This research should contribute to the UNESCO IITE activities in the development of recommendations and normative guidelines for OER in CIS and to the Open University activities oriented towards OER collections containing materials prepared in the languages other than English.
The funding provided by Olnetwill support IITE expert four-week visit to the Open University UK in June 2010. A particular focus of the consultations to be held in Milton Keynes will be studying the experience of various OU UK OER initiatives, in particular, the Multilingual Open Resources for Independent Learning initiative. A two-week stay at the Open University of Catalonia is planned for September 2010 to discuss their approaches to dealing with Spanish-language OER with local experts. A report summing up the study results shall be prepared.