This case study is based on three projects funded by SCORE which looked at various aspects of student use and experience of OER and assessment: 1) ‘OERs e-assessment and learning’; 2) ‘SCORE Higher: using OER to explore self-assessment for first year postgraduate researchers’; and 3) ‘Developing students as content scavengers’. The second project forms the central core of the case study with the two other projects feeding in their respective findings where appropriate.
The project identified ten students new to postgraduate research and interviewed them to get a sense of their understanding of the RDF and their expectations of skills development at the start of candidature. The main finding from the interviews was that new PhD students struggle to make sense of the RDF and to link the skills outlined within it to their doctoral studies. A set of OER were developed to try to situate the RDF within the context of the PhD stressing the importance and relevance of skills development to the successful completion of a research degree. At the end of the project the students participated in an exit interview which repeated the questions from the introductory interview to facilitate an analysis of how their understanding of the RDF skills development and their own skills level had changed during the project.
These case studies were created by SCORE (Support Centre for Open Resources in Education) fellows as part of the joint HEA / JISC Open Educational Resources study; pedagogical development from OER practice.
