The National Resource Hub, a searchable collection of open educational resources (OER) for teaching and learning from across the Irish higher education sector was launched today. The development of the National Resource Hub was led by the National Forum in consultation with the sector and represents further implementation of the National Forum’s overall commitment to open educational practices that will enable the continued sharing of teaching and learning resources in a sustainable way.
Over the past several years, the National Forum has worked to enhance open education capabilities across the sector. All resources developed as part of National Forum-funded initiatives are required to be openly licensed, to facilitate sharing and reuse. To support this open practice, the National Forum developed the Open Licensing Toolkit (2019), the How to Choose an Open Licence guide (2020), and the online resource ‘Using OER and OEP in Teaching and Learning’ (2021), all available at www.teachingandlearning.ie/open. In addition, the National Forum aims to model open practice by sharing all National Forum resources openly (using Creative Commons CC BY licences).
The resource hub will enable resources developed through the Strategic Alignment Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund 2019 and 2020 be shared across the sector. In addition, OER that have been created, adapted and/or used to enhance teaching and learning by anyone in Irish higher education can be shared so that good practice and resources developed by one initiative can be adapted and shared by others.
The National Resource Hub enables users to browse by category, or use the dedicated search function to find openly-licensed teaching and learning resources in a variety of media formats that can be viewed, downloaded or saved to a user account. In addition, users can submit their own openly-licensed resources, i.e. OER, that they have created so that colleagues from across the sector can benefit from their work.
The primary goal of the National Resource hub is to enable those who teach to share with others who can reuse, adapt and learn from their OER – while they in turn can make use of others’ OER to enhance their teaching practice.
The National Forum looks forward to further developing the National Resource Hub in partnership with Ireland’s higher education sector.
The National Resource Hub can be accessed at https://hub.teachingandlearning.ie/
