By Dave Forrest
As we have seen in previous blog posts, our institutional commitment to OER is visible in our policy, in our Academic Career Pathways, and in the institutional steering group chaired by Professor Louise Robson and Helen Moore.
As a member of the education leadership team, I have been really delighted to get to sit as a member of this group, ensuring that its work feeds into education practice and policy development across the institution. What I see is deep expertise, rich, diverse, innovative work; and a passion for students - in short, the things that make this university what it is.
As Deputy Vice President for Education (Student Experience) I’m particularly interested in how OER might engage our students. There is something uniquely exciting about an educational resource that might help to support the learner before they begin their journey with us, form an intrinsic part of the student’s experience of their curriculum, and then stay with the graduate long after they leave us.
There is power, too, in the idea that OER can be developed as our disciplines and intellectual concerns shift and evolve. OER offer educators the opportunity to customise and contextualise their content so that it can reflect our diverse learning community. A resource that can be edited, updated, and reshaped is a resource that can quite literally move with the times, ensuring that our students are accessing the most up to date, cutting edge thinking in their areas; reminding us all that education is always a process of exchange and dialogue.
This sense of the OER as always something which is iterative also means that resources can be adapted and developed in partnership with students. Positioning OER so that they can respond to student feedback, or perhaps even be co-produced with students, recognises the deep expertise and insight that they bring to our own development as educators.
OER also gives our passionate, talented, and innovative staff a mechanism to develop their profiles as educators who are able to have an impact beyond their own classrooms, and positively influence the learning of students and the practice of teachers well beyond Sheffield. They offer a platform to staff to share and build on the inspiring work that happens here with the wider educational community.
Next steps
Our aim now is to continue to build on the growing excellent practice at Sheffield to begin to explore ways of working at scale with programmes and disciplines.
If this is something you’re excited by, we want to hear from you (oer@sheffield.ac.uk).
Dave Forrest is Deputy Vice President for Education (Student Experience)
OER and the Sheffield Education experience © 2026 by the University of Sheffield is licensed under Attribution 4.0 International, except where otherwise noted.