JISC is delighted to announce that the University of Oxford has won the grant for the ‘JISC World War One (WW1) Open Educational Resources (OER)’ project. This initiative will collect and release digital learning content as OER in an easily accessible online platform to provide an academic-driven corpus of reusable scholarly resources that seek to readdress World War One and its cultural, historical, and political context.
The project will surface the highest quality OER through a series of expert commentaries created by some of the most notable academics in the field of World War One studies and related disciplines. Alongside these thematic directory areas of additional expert-curated OER and dynamic libraries of relevant resources from the wider OER community will be made available. The project will innovatively revisualise a series of OER to showcase the full potential of using open material to seed academic debate.
Due to the breadth of academic engagement with the project, it is hoped that some of the core motivating factors for JISC in undertaking this work will start to be addressed e.g. encouraging new academic interpretations around WW1 to challenge received notions of historical fact and build on new areas of research and study. It will also provide new insights into the global nature of the conflict and provide new ways by which students, learners and researchers can engage with and draw out fresh perspectives in one of the most taught and researched periods of European and global history.
The project is an exciting collaboration between the teams at the University of Oxford responsible for the First World War Poetry Digital Archive and the Great War Archive (funded under the JISC Content and Digitisation Programme), and the Oxford Open Spires, Triton, and Great Writers projects (funded under the HEA/JISC Open Educational Resources Programme Phases 1, 2 and 3). This project team will therefore bring together a wealth of experience from pedagological and content perspectives to create a unique and timely open educational resource that brings the people, events and places of WW1 back into sharp relief for the benefit of education and research.
As with the JISC WW1 Discovery programme, this project shall be underpinned by the JISC ‘Statement of Intent’
For more information, please contact Katharine Lindsay at katharine.lindsay@oucs.ox.ac.uk
A project blog shall also follow shortly