Open Learning

Politics in Spires was developed by the Triton project, funded by JISC and the HEA as part of the Open Educational Resources Programme Phase 2.

The aim of the Triton project was to bring high-quality open educational resources (OER) closer to the politics and international relations subject community through new tools developed around a cross-institutional blog Politics in Spires. By ‘discovering’ hundreds of open materials and linking these to new scholarly blog posts, the new site presents a wealth of learning resources for the subject community and the wider public audience. The open materials may include audio and video podcasts, blog posts, and other learning resources, all of which are licensed for reuse and redistribution.

There are two sections within this area of open learning:

Dynamic collections – thematically sorted collections of subject specific OERs harvested from the web, with community tools to highlight relevance and aid selection.

Here are some example dynamic collections (See all Dynamic Collections)

Political Theory

Comparative Government

International Relations

European Politics and Society

Learning path creator – a new bookmarking tool which allows registered users to bookmark in their browser any online resource and deposit this within the blog framework. This bookmark approach quickly builds new groups of quality-controlled, curated OER which provide a structured list or learning pathway around a thematic topic. Examples are shown here (See all learning paths)

Arab Spring

London riots

By bringing these OERs to the politics and international relations subject communities we hope to show that this is an effective way to increase their discoverability.

More information about the Open Learning aims of Politics in Spires is available in this vodcast.