Open Educational Partnerships and Collective Learning

At the Open University in Scotland "openness" is part of our sense of self; our engagement with Open Educational Resources and Practices (OER/OEP) seems obvious. In this paper we explore some of those obvious aspects and using our partnership with a third sector organisation explore some of the less apparent aspects of openness. In addition to an account of the development and design of a suite of learning resources, the paper also reflects on how those resources have been used in practice, and the ways the design process has informed future developments. In doing so the paper attempts to be open and honest about the practice of openness in partnership. The paper is based on a partnership with a third sector organisation Community Energy Scotland (CES). It is funded by the Scottish Government to support and administer funding to community groups interested in energy and sustainability. Some of these communities take forward large scale commercial renewable energy projects, the majority are interested in improving the energy performance of local community facilities "facilities projects". This paper concerns the development and piloting of a suite of learning resources to support those facilities projects. In particular it looks at the opportunities that openness in partnership presents for HE providers. As an open and distance learning institution it is "normal practice" for us to think about access in relation to a wide range of factors. Open educational partnerships create new questions and new challenges that disrupt our ideas of open practices and the idea of OEP more generally. Some are around the different needs of partners and learners, in particular how that informs pedagogical design, and some around what 'open' means in partnership. Finally, the paper looks at how the materials have been used, and what the development of them has "taught us" about future partnerships and open practices more generally.