Project Co-PILOT

The University of Birmingham and London School of Economics and Political Science will be working with the Information Literacy Section of UNESCO on a short project funded by JISC and the Higher Education Academy under phase three of their open educational resources (OER) programme running from October until December 2012.

Project CoPILOT (Community of Practice for Information Literacy Online Teaching) seeks to promote internationally the sharing of over 50 UK OERs on digital and information literacy which were developed as part of the DELILA project. The materials were developed for those delivering teacher training in higher education to help them embed digital and information literacy in their courses. The resources were deposited in local repositories at Birmingham and LSE and in Jorum, and have been promoted in the UK at a number of conferences for educational developers and librarians.

This project will develop a strategy to promote sharing the resources to teachers, educational developers and librarians internationally and would build on links that the project leaders have already established with UNESCO, who have a dual interest in OERs and information literacy. It will explore the use of an online community platform (WSIS Communities) and various international networks that could be used to promote the resources and the community of practice established to share resources.

The project is supported by the CILIP Information Literacy Group who have been working with the project leads to develop a community of practice to support sharing of information literacy OERs in the UK. The project will explore ways in which the UK network can be fully exploited to promote sharing of OERs internationally, through events and online communities.

Project Aims and Objectives

• To identify 10 appropriate information and digital literacy OERs, from a suite of 50 developed as part of the DELILA project and hosted on Jorum and repositories at LSE and the University of Birmingham, to share with an international audience of librarians and learning developers. In order to appeal to the broadest groups, these will be OERs covering subjects such as Doing a Literature Search and Using Images in Teaching.
• To identify an appropriate online community platform to be used as a virtual meeting place and sharing space (to host links to OERs) for librarians and learning developers from around the world. (The UNESCO WSIS Knowledge Communities platform has already been identified as the best potential site for this).
• To develop a IL OER international sharing strategy using online communities (including technical and promotional requirements). This strategy will then be shared online using an open licence.

For further details please contact Nancy Graham (n.graham.1@bham.ac.uk) or Jane Secker (j.secker@lse.ac.uk.

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