Increasing access to OERs: Sylla demo and briefing

SCONUL hosted a webinar on 18 March to showcase the service being offered by a relatively new start-up, Sylla, which helps libraries to identify and surface relevant and appropriate open educational resources quickly and easily, thereby saving libraries time and money.

More information on Sylla is available here. In summary, Sylla’s tool allows HEs & FEs to easily identify open and affordable learning resources aligned to a course syllabus or paid-for resources in use today (e.g. based on your reading list); add in ancillary teaching materials such as test banks and lecture slides; and add these to the VLE.

We heard from Tom Mosterd and colleagues from Sylla who set out the genesis of the initiative, explaining how the service works and providing a demo.

We also heard from three institutions working with Sylla:

1. Phil Brabban, Chief Librarian and Group Director of Learning Resources, Coventry University. Coventry has been collaborating with Sylla on a project to promote and implement Open Educational Resources (OER) for up to 16 high-enrolment modules within the School of Business and Law which has realised savings of £95k to date.
2. Elly Cope , Head of Access and Acquisitions, University of Leeds. Leeds is a new development partner, exploring how the tool could be integrated with reading list workflows.
3. Joe Pettican, Licensing Portfolio Specialist – Learning, Teaching & Assessment, Jisc. Jisc is currently working on a pilot proposal with Sylla and Joe will briefly talk about the development of this.

You can access the recording and other resources here