Joss Winn has just blogged about the successful JISC bid for Chemistry.FM. JISC have committed £18K to this which follows on from work carried out under the CERD-funded Fund for Educational Development Scheme. See below for more details:

The university has successfully bid for £18,000 project funding under JISC’s Open Educational Resources Programme. The project will release all educational resources used in Year 1 ‘Introductory Chemistry for Forensic Science’ (total of 30 credits). The course is designed to cover all the major areas of chemistry (inorganic, organic and physical).

Last year, through internal, competitive bidding, the Centre for Educational Research and Development funded the production of high quality, student-produced videos, which help explain difficult concepts using a mixture of animation and live action. Due to interest from other institutions, the videos are now available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence. The project will extend this approach to all resources for this course. In addition, we will work with Siren FM a campus-based community radio station, employing their recording and broadcasting expertise to develop additional multimedia resources with students and apply current online broadcasting methods to the creation and delivery of these materials. All resources will be made available through our JISC-funded Institutional Repository, third-party Web 2.0 services and via a dedicated website powered by Siren.FM. By employing both students and a campus-based enterprise, we will demonstrate a sustainable and innovative approach to the development and dissemination of OERs.

The university recognises the potential that free and unfettered access to educational resources offers to the local and wider community and welcomes the opportunity to examine how technology and an emerging legal framework can promote creativity and the sustainability of the open educational resources we produce. Our interest in OER is set within a broader framework of debates about pedagogic innovation and the role and nature of universities in the 21st century. One of the intended impacts of our proposed project at Lincoln will be to inject elements from the debate on curriculum design into the OER movement in HE.

The 12 month project will be led by the Centre for Educational Research and Development, working with colleagues from the Department of Forensic and Biomedical Sciences, Lincoln School of Journalism,  Lincoln Business School and Siren FM. A full project plan will be available on the project blog before the end of May.