The OpenTab project began by looking at other open educational resources (OER) projects to learn about their experiences and consider how they might be applied to OpenTab.
Sharing resources among colleagues is a common activity and one that we need to open up more widely.

There are a number of issues recurring throughout the literature:
Quality of resources
Two models of peer-review have emerged; review-and-rank model, rank by rate of adoption/adaptation.
Sustainability of the OER movement. There needs to be a community of practice in order to ensure ongoing viability of OER.
The need for institutional support is clear. LTU provides the first stage of support in its IP policy, which encourages open sharing of teaching and learning materials.

In stage 2 we set about sharing information about OER within the faculty and educating colleagues about OER and how it works.
We spoke to curriculum designers to spruik the benefits of OER and discuss its application in enquiry-based learning (EBL) model.

We discovered varying degrees of awareness of OER in the faculty. For some this was their first discussion of OER, for others it was a chance to share their own experiences of OER, with some discovering that some resources not as open as OER definition describes.

The barriers to introducing OER include:
Levels of openness – some resources are free & accessible, but not open for modification & reuse.
Timing was a major obstacle for the OpenTab project. Embarking on the project in the middle of course design process seemed ideal, but in practice was difficult to achieve, partly due to timing of tendering process for publisher resources, which presented problems for determining what OERs we could build ourselves & how OER would fit with other paid materials. Our goal was also difficult to achieve partly because it was too much change at once for the course designers (in conjunction with the introduction of EBL pedagogy). The message we received was “one challenge at a time, please”. The course design process was complex and introducing OER as well was confronting for many.

Educational resources are produced by expert educators, with publication and distribution functions outsourced to publishers, who can undertake the these processes more efficiently than universities can, especially in the print environment.
The internet provides a means for universities to do this all themselves electronically, by simplifying and reducing production costs.
The traditional process is external to the university – educators write the content on their own time, for which the publishers reward them financially, and in turn publishers get their return on investment by charging the students and libraries.

This system could be changed by altering one element of the nexus. If universities provided the time and professional recognition/incentive for educators to develop these materials in-house (i.e. on university time), we could put an end to the cycle of dependence (universities dependent on publishers for content, publishers dependent on educators to write the content and on students to pay for the content). In doing so, we reduce one of the barriers to education – cost of accessing materials – and also the financial burden on libraries who have to ensure that there are sufficient copies of textbooks available for students who do not purchase personal copies.

OpenTab aimed to make formal university education more accessible for all students. This is important in a climate of pushing for increased enrolment of students from low-SES backgrounds.

What we need to break the cycle is collaboration.
- institutional
- among colleagues
This type of collaboration is new to faculty. There are many examples of cooperation; people working in teams with individual goals. Collaboration = team work with shared goals, making something together.

Where is OpenTab now?
We are building a collaboration team to develop a set of OERs to be used in end-of-semester assessment. This is a trial to develop a process for OER practice & discover what other issues we may come across.
-> Aim to develop materials that can be used on iPads in classroom environment.
-> Issues:
- how to deliver materials to the students?
- how to share our resources more widely?
- where to store electronically at LTU?
- what to share?
Resources can be built upon; we control the development process.

- Continue educating colleagues
- Focus on collaboration & sharing skills
- Spread through faculty, university
- Focus on utilising our own resources
-> to build accessible educational experience, to reducing barriers to education.