Openness and practice: innovations through openness in partnership

At the Open University in Scotland (OUiS )being open is part of our sense of who we are through open licences like Creative Commons we have developed suites of Open Educational Resources (OER) which are “freely” available online to use, to reuse and remix. However, while there is great deal of rhetoric around OER, it is not clear how openness is changing practices. The paper explores this through two case studies. The first case study draws on work the OUiS has done with a national charity that supports community energy projects. The second case study will draw on some work with a regional charity that provides home energy advice. It looks at how we can develop appropriate energy advice by working with tenants and the charity to create a series of home energy OER by tenants for tenants. The paper closes with some question about the sustainability of “free” resources