INNOVATIVE OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES IN EUROPEAN HIGHER EDUCATION

The European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU) has been working with renowned open and distance teaching universities in Europe on developing strategies for Open Educational Resources (OER) by means of the EADTU taskforce on Multilingual Open Resources for Independent Learning (MORIL). The US-based William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has been acting as a financial catalyst to this taskforce and affiliated projects. By grant of two bids from the Foundation viz., the MORIL grant and MORIL Supplementary grant, OER momentum has been created at participating universities and associated strategies developed. Because of the receipt of a new grant from the European Commission under the Erasmus Lifelong Learning Programme, within the strand of Virtual Campus, EADTU is able to continue this work and sustain its work with universities on OER. The new European project is called "Innovative OER in European Higher Education (OER HE)" and includes 11 European university partners. It consolidates and extends the activities which have begun under the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation grants. The paper presents this OER HE project.