Overview of papers on enhancement of European Higher Education as presented during the Online, Open and Flexible Higher Education Conference in Rome, October 2016

In 2012, a combination of academic, technical and support staff formed a project team which, with the support of senior University College Cork management, developed an Open Educational Resource for UCC students called RED – Resources for Education (http://www.ucc.ie/en/red/). RED was developed on the core principles of Creative Commons licensing (OER), accessibility, universal design for learning and responsive design. In the last four years the project team which has included representatives from UCC Students’ Union, Teaching and Learning, Disability Support Service, UCC Library and individual academic schools has served as custodians to the RED mission informed by these four principles.

This paper will outline how the project team have used staff and student feedback together with usage analytics to develop and supplement the resource from 2012-2016. These iterations took RED from a text based resource hosted on a Joomla CMS platform to a more eclectic selection of multimedia resources developed for the proprietary TerminalFour CMS used by UCC. As UCC has committed in a thoroughgoing fashion to the design, development and delivery of online and blended learning postgraduate degrees and CPD courses, RED has been adopted as the de facto support tool for those students seeking information which would typically have been available from on-site services at face to face sessions – academic writing skills, financial planning, guides to critical thinking, technical skills etc.

Finally, this paper will outline the planned developments for the 2016-17 academic year and the research and analytics that has underpinned these initiatives.

Keywords

blended learning · collaboration · higher education · open education resource · responsive design · study skills · universal design