POERUP, Policies for OER Uptake, was a project part-funded under the Lifelong Learning Programme of the European Commission during the period November 2011 until June 2014 inclusive.

Now all the project’s key outputs and public deliverables are finalised and available to the public Paul Bacsich, the POERUP Project Manager, highlights the project’s main achievements.

The project’s overall aim was to develop policy recommendations to promote the uptake of OER (Open Educational Resources) in the educational sector, and to further the range of purposes for which institutions deploy OER: opening up education, widening access (internationally and in particular for developing countries), higher quality or lower cost of teaching – and combinations of these. These policy advice documents – for schools, for universities and for colleges and other organised education providers – were to be oriented to the European Union and a specified range of other countries.

The more than 500 selected OER initiatives are all documented in a large wiki database and are displayed on an interactive, progressive OER Map.

OER policy map

We invite you to browse the collection and if you have initiatives to add, submit your contribution.

The POERUP team achieved their aims and objectives by:

• studying a range of countries in Europe and seen as relevant to Europe, in order to understand what OER activities and initiatives are under way, and why they are continuing (or stopping, or starting) – and taking account of reports from other agencies and projects studying OER in other countries;
•  researching case studies of the end-user–producer communities behind OER initiatives in order to refine and elaborate recommendations to formulate a set of action points that can be applied to ensuring the realisation of successful, lively and sustainable OER communities;
•  developing informed ideas on policy formulation using evidence from POERUP and (the few) other policy-oriented studies, POERUP staff’s own experience in related projects, and ongoing advice from other experts in the field.

The project used a multi-method research approach to triangulate research data from different sources to gain an in-depth view of the European OER policy environment by:

• Producing a global inventory of over 500 relevant national and other large-scale OER initiatives as a result of a thorough desktop analysis. These initiatives are all documented in a large database and can be shown on a searchable OER Map. Many more initiatives are discussed in the country reports and associated tables.
• Producing 11 country reports and 22 mini-reports. These country reports were created based on literature review and document analysis of relevant policy papers and country reports from previous projects.
• Selecting eight case studies from the inventory in the context of the country studies. To gain an in-depth view into the dynamics of OER communities, Social Network Analysis (SNA) methodology was used.
• Creation of policy advice reports for universities, schools and colleges.

POERUP wiki

For further information the reader is referred to the POERUP web site – in particular the page on key outputs at http://www.poerup.info/key_outputs.html – and to the collection of documents on the POERUP wiki – in particular http://poerup.referata.com/wiki/Main_Page.

The POERUP wiki is a semantic wiki and both it and the OER map make use of Linked Open Data and can deliver key information as Linked Open Data – see in particular the OER Map API page at http://www.poerup.org.uk/api/