OER project research community

eLanguages began research in the area of Open Educational Resources (OERs) through a number of projects that began in 2007. The JISC-funded L2O Project investigated community sharing of Language Learning Objects (LOs) and developed an experimental repository, CLARe, to enable the storing and sharing of the project LO outputs.

This project was followed by MURLLO (Management, Use and Re-purposing of Language Learning Objects), an Eduserv-funded project, which explored the development of tools to assist in the application of contextual metadata, resource discovery, and editing of LOs.

CLAReT (Contextualised Learning Activity Repository Tools), another JISC-funded project, took the CLARe repository and contextual metadata further by investigating and mapping the language teaching and learning domain and using Web 2.0 interfaces (such as tag clouds and principles of social networking) to assist in better resource discovery. The L2O research community continued to expand and take part in all of these projects.

Faroes, a further JISC-funded Capital Project, led by the Learning Societies Laboratory in ECS at the University of Southampton, built on this work and developed LanguageBox, a repository for sharing language learning resources in distributed social spaces.

eLanguages and a group of part-time modern language teachers from the Modern Languages department at the University of Southampton are involved in the JISC-funded FAVOR (Finding a Voice through Open Resources) Project. This OER Project aims to showcase the excellent and often unrecognised work of part-time language teachers in Higher Education. It will demonstrate the contribution such teachers make to academic culture and the learning experience offered by their institutions; and also engage them in activities which will enhance the student experience. The tutors are publishing their language teaching resources as open content and creating additional resources. For more information see the FAVOR Project blog.