The University of Birmingham and London School of Economics and Political Science are working with the Communication and Information Sector of UNESCO on a short project funded by JISC and the Higher Education Academy under Phase 3 of their UK open educational resources (OER) programme.

Project CoPILOT (Community of Practice for Information Literacy Online Teaching) seeks to promote internationally the sharing of OERs on digital and information literacy which were developed as part of the DELILA project.. The materials were developed for those delivering teacher training in higher education to help them embed digital and information literacy in their courses. The resources were deposited in local repositories at Birmingham and LSE and in Jorum, and have been promoted in the UK at a number of conferences for educational developers and librarians.

This project will develop a strategy to promote sharing the resources to teachers, educational developers and librarians internationally and would build on links that the project leaders have already established with UNESCO, who have a dual interest in OERs and information literacy. It is exploring the use of an online community platform and various international networks that could be used to promote the resources and the community of practice established to share resources.

The project is supported by the CILIP Information Literacy Group who have been working with the project leads to develop a community of practice to support sharing of information literacy OERs in the UK. The project will explore ways in which the UK network can be fully exploited to promote sharing of OERs internationally, through events and online communities.

Update: The project is now well underway with over 30 members from over 12 different countries using the project space on UNESCO’s WSIS site for lively discussions and to upload links to IL resources that they use.  The project funding officially ends at Christmas but activity on the WSIS will continue into 2013, so if you’re interested please email Nancy Graham at n.graham.1@bham.ac.uk

For further details please contact Nancy Graham (n.graham.1@bham.ac.uk) or Jane Secker (j.secker@lse.ac.uk) or see http://delilaopen.wordpress.com/project-co-pilot/