Teresa Connolly, The Open University, UK
Elpida Makriyannis, The Open University, UK

ABSTRACT

The Open Educational Resources (OER) community supports the belief that knowledge is a public good and, combined with technological advancement, can provide an extraordinary opportunity to help equalize the distribution of high-quality knowledge and educational opportunities for everyone in the world. Our chapter hypothesis centres on the premise that: “The OER ecology does not seem to be widely adopted or understood and that game-playing has the potential to raise awareness and improve understanding of such relationships in an entertaining manner, while engaging in a deep discussion about OER best practices.” To address this hypothesis we present OERopoly, a game that has been designed and developed to raise awareness about OER. We set out to assess game-playing as a means of improving collaborative learning opportunities around OER projects through this OER ecology: the OER projects themselves, the online communities and the Web 2.0 technologies used by OER projects.