The question is interesting, since it involves the production of OER resources, rather than the release of existing OER resources, as done in this project. In these terms, I have been lucky with my project, since it was developed with the intention of being open source from the start.
Technologically there were two key issues that made this easy for me. Firstly, I am a Mac user, and I’m aware of the compatibility issues between operating systems. This was something I was keen to avoid in any of the resources I developed – hence components were made in Java or as standard HTML. Secondly I have a fundamental dislike of most virtual learning environments. In general I think most virtual learning environments are unnecessary and it is far easier to confidently use the commercial standard packages such as Dreamweaver for producing online resources. This removes any potential conflicts for end users of resources (although some aspects of Dreamweaver don’t appear fully compatible with Microsoft IE, they work fine with Firefox, Safari, Opera etc).
So, from a technological perspective, my advice for producing OER resources would be to use industry standard software rather than university standards when initially designing resources. The issues of security and password protection are not really relevant to OER resources anyway.
In terms of securing institutional release of OER resources, there appears to be two ways forward. Firstly, given most IPR policies, if the work does not involve current teaching resources, then copyright is owned by the individual, and as such poses no problem. Secondly, if the work will involve teaching resources for the institution, then it makes sense to ensure an open policy is in place before the work is initiated (the question states production of resources, obviously many people can’t retrospectively do this in the current project). This was the case with my project – initially it was CETL funded, and part of the funding bid was related to open release of digital resources and uploads to JORUM.
[...] 11, 2010 · Leave a Comment Rick Stafford has a new post on technical compatibility and open educational resources. From the post: So, from [...]