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Open Educational Resources for the Digital Humanities

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Aims and Objectives

DHOER is turning a comprehensive range of teaching and learning resources from a series of introductory courses into Digital Humanities taught at the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, into multimedia and Web 2.0 enriched Open Educational Resources (OERs), published on the internet and freely available to anyone. In doing so it will create an important teaching and learning resource not only for the emerging and strategically important subject area of Digital Humanities and cognate disciplines but also address a large range of the sector priority areas.

Apart from serving the Digital Humanities, a distinctive subject in its own right,  for which only very low and unsystematic OER provision exists currently, the DHOER project will benefit many cognate disciplines, including but not limited to the whole spectrum of the broader arts and humanities, information studies, archive and library studies and computer science.

The project will extend the range of available OERs in the field of Digital Humanities substantially and systematise the provision in a way that cuts across the existing and perceived boundaries between subject disciplines. As such it is interdisciplinary and innovative and will help transform the traditional view of the Arts and Humanities as subject areas of comparatively little relevance for employment.

DHOER will cater directly for the needs of particular sectors of employment, including documentation, archives, libraries and publishing, but will also directed at the larger requirements of the digital information age. It fits in with the Government's strategic vision for ensuring that the UK is at the leading edge of the global digital economy ('Digital Britain') and opens up numerous perspectives to increase advanced information literacy and related skills in the UK; skills much in demand for the knowledge economy envisaged by the 'New industries - New Jobs' strategy.

To achieve these aims and objectives, the project will draw on the expertise of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and Department of Information Studies. In addition it will draw on the experience with creating and releasing OERs, and the cultural changes this process brings about for learning and teaching, gathered by the principal investigator in the individual strand of the pilot phase of the UKOER programme (OER Low Countries history). His home department, UCL Dutch, has been pioneering OERs at UCL with the Virtual Department of Dutch initiative since 2002.