Gates Ventures

About the OER Project

The OER Project has developed a number of full courses for use in schools and looked to enable teachers in the successful delivery and tools to improve student outcomes.

• Project duration: March-September 2020
• Research pillar category: Personalisation

About Gates Ventures

Gates Ventures is the private office of Bill Gates. The OER Project is an initiative within Gates Ventures looking at best practice and innovation around the development of Open Educational Resources (OER) and teacher professional development for schools.

The Problem

The OER Project has found that 55% of teachers in the US spend between 5 to 10 hours of their time every week looking for free, online resources. Too often, these resources are disconnected and incomplete. The OER Project aims to address this need by providing a complete, unified learning programme for particular subject areas and not simply a collection of resources put together using a variety of learning theories and design principles.

Bob Regan, Sr. Director for education at Gates Ventures had previously worked with Trinity College Dublin and this provided the introduction to the Learnovate Centre. At the beginning of the Covid pandemic, the OER Project wanted to meet the tremendous needs of teachers suddenly moving from in person to online instruction. They asked the Learnovate team to help them formulate a set of evidence-based guidelines to share with teachers around the design and delivery of online learning.

OER Project shared these guidelines with the more than 10,000 teachers OER Project online teacher community. They quickly saw that Learnovate were a uniquely multi-disciplinary team comprised of experts in Learning Design, User Experience Design, Learning Technologies and, also, Innovation and Design Thinking. As Bob describes it, the Learnovate team is “fluent in multiple languages”. Learnovate also functions in a very agile, iterative manner that enables it to produce research outputs in shorter cycles than traditional academic research teams.

The Result

The OER Project is coming up on its ten-year anniversary. To celebrate, they are creating a resource detailing what they have learned about creating great courses that have a positive impact on students.

• Learnovate has been an essential partner in this project, rapidly producing literature reviews in support of key topics covered in the retrospective. One such topic is what makes for a healthy online Community of Practice.
• When OER Project presented the research to its community of teachers, it was less about telling them “this is what you have to do” and more about stimulating a conversation based on what the research was saying. This has been largely possible because of the way Learnovate strikes a unique balance between research and practice.

As Bob Regan explains: “We’ve done multiple projects with Learnovate and got the results in front of people on a short cycle”.