This paper addresses how to design open educational resources (OER) with community stakeholder groups so they can be shared with other community practitioners openly, online and repurposed for other contexts. As academics who focus on youth justice and community development engaging with community stakeholder groups to conduct research and shape curriculum development is familiar. With curriculum emerging from and through a deeper understanding of context and developed in for and through practice. The paper looks at the challenges of applying this approach to the development of OER.
The paper draws on a partnership between five European Institutions of Higher Education and a range of community stakeholder groups. Through these we have developed ten case studies that investigate a range of different assets based approaches. Through what we term Collaborative Open Educational Resources (COERs) the partnership will develop these ten case studies into a suite of OER which will speak to community workers, who are interested in implementing assets based approaches to community participation, in a wide range of different contexts. Assets are contextual and vary across time and space. We argue that they are negotiated in that one can not decide what an asset is or how it might operate in a given context without engaging in deliberative discussion within that context.
Our approach is to work with each locale to make the tacit knowledge within practice explicit, the assets are surfaced so one can unpick wider lessons from the local or national contextual factors. Here the question of open relates to pedagogic practice, of using established disciplinary approaches to opening up content, while also being mindful of and open to use practices beyond the original context.
