OpenSpires – Free thinking from Oxford University.
This Open Educational Resources project was a year long project funded by HEFCE and the JISC formally finishing in April 2010.The Learning Technologies Group, Oxford University Computing Services, University of Oxford has released for reuse over 700 lectures and talks from Oxford University academics. The main OpenSpires site has a searchable collection of material and also project resources connected with the management of the project.
OpenSpires has two purposes:
- to increase the amount of audio and video content released from Oxford as Open Content Resources (OER),
- to enable the University to investigate and disseminate the institutional implications of making some of this material available as ‘Open Content’.
The OpenSpires project builds upon the Oxford on iTunes U podcasting service launched in October 2008, which has widespread participation from Oxford academics. Oxford podcasts currently include recordings of public lectures, including those from eminent visiting speakers, interviews with researchers, and conference presentations. OpenSpires will have a global impact, as the free-to-download resources are in many cases from speakers, researchers and visiting lecturers with high international profiles.
To date over 700 podcasts are available from OpenSpires under Creative Commons licences and they can be found listed at http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/openspires.html and http://openspires.nsms.ox.ac.uk/ (improved beta version, still under development).