Apologies for any cross posting.

This month's Future Teacher session 

Open educational resources, open source and inclusive practice.

Open Educational Resources have fantastic potential to reduce inefficiency. Why would hundreds of staff in hundreds of organisations create their own versions of the same resource if a good open-source version already exists?

Unfortunately, open educational resources are not always as open as we might hope. They may be incapable of modification or contain avoidable accessibility barriers. Some resources - like complex images, virtual reality or simulations - may add considerable value to some users but be unavoidably difficult for others. Organisations may have different policy approaches to using them, reducing their value across the sector.

How can we approach these challenges in a mature way? How can we take a coherent approach to ensure we share the simple stuff in formats and platforms that allow modification? How can we develop pragmatic practices and protocols for the more challenging resources?

In this month’s future teacher session we will hear from:

• David Graham (University of York) on the adoption of an OpenStax textbook for anatomy and physiology in Nursing. A free, online, peer reviewed textbook with multiple instructor resources including a blackboard course cartridge; it does not get much better than this!
• Joanna Evans and Mari Fflur from Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol together with Bethan Wyn Jones from Bangor University will share their experiences of managing and creating Welsh medium OER content for the Resource Portal ‘ Y Porth’ . They will address the importance of developing open shared resources in the Welsh Language, and will highlight some of the challenges around creating accessible OERs in languages that are less supported in digital tools and environments.  
• Julian Tenney (University of Nottingham) will introduce an opportunity to join an action focused accessibility community, developing shared resources, guidance and policy recommendations.

As always there’s plenty of opportunity to engage with the speakers either through the text chat or after the session in an open discussion.

We’d love to see you there. Registration is free (and you need to register how to get the link).

Register here (or plain text link  - http://bit.ly/ft30ukpage).

The session is recorded, so if you can't come don't worry about registering but obviously if you do come you have a chance to interact with speakers and other participants!

Looking ahead

Our March session would fall in the middle of the Easter holidays, the day before Good Friday. So, we’re all going to make the most of the holiday instead. There will be no March session. 

The April Future Teacher session is on Learning Analytics for Mere Mortals. The focus is on the use of learning Analytics by teachers and lecturers rather than by administrators. If you have any examples of the way you’ve used data to provide support for students or to improve quality, engagement or outcomes, please let us know. We’re looking for practical examples that could be replicated in other institutions. 

Very best wishes from the Future Teacher volunteers...

Sian, Teresa, Rosemarie, Ron, Lilian and Alistair