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The concept of Open Educational Resources (OER) is a major breakthrough in education, which promotes sharing, adaptation and contextualisation of course content. Promotion of using OER can be very cost effective, since development of new course content would be both expensive and time consuming. However, awareness raising and capacity building of teachers and learners is crucial, in order to exploit the full potential of OER.

The Faculty of Education at the Open University of Sri Lanka, initiated a research project to create an Online Learning Environment (OLE) on OER for science education, witha view to raise awareness, develop competencies and enhance adapting, adoption and creation of OER by teachers. This is developed in Moodle Learning Management System, as a supplementary material for science teachers enrolled in a distance mode professional development programme. The research team, together with a group of science teachers and teacher educators, who are their students, is engaged in this action research conducted in several stages: analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation. This paper discusses the first three stages, concerning the following objectives: to identify sources of OER for science education, to make key design decisions of the OLE, and to design and develop the OLE on OER for science education.

The analysis of need, learner, task and context, resulted in making decisions on information, instruction, interaction and interface design. Some initial design decisions are: Structuring of information on finding, using and creating OER related to teaching science, while making it relevant and meaningful for teachers; Use of exploratory instructional strategies enabling teachers to select OER; Incorporate frequent interactions encouraging teachers to adopt, adapt, create and share OER; and Use of different media elements to make the visual layout motivating. A prototype will be pilot tested with science teachers with a view to revise and improve the OLE on OER. Allowing student teachers/teacher educators to work collaboratively with their instructors, as a team, enable both parties to face challenges together, in this novel experience of designing and developing an OLE on OER.

Defining degradation in terms of physical deficiency-based condition descriptors, combined with Markov chain modelling, has been shown to provide improved predictions of degradation. However, unless these physical conditions are converted to lost value ratios (LVRs), maintenance managers would not be able to grasp the cost implications of degradation. Hence the purpose of this research is to convert the predicted deficiency-based condition ratings to lost value ratio bands.

Rectification costs were found using a Building Schedule of Rates to arrive at LVRs for each of the physical degradation conditions for the 12 building elements studied (ranging from concrete elements through finishes and ceilings to doors and windows). These LVRs were allocated into five bands with LVR interval limits of 0.00, 0.10, 0.25, 0.50, 0.75 and 1.00, with the five intervening ranges corresponding to LVR Bands A to E. These computations were compared with those arrived at independently by industry professionals.

Elements such as doors, widows and ceilings reached the maximum LVR Band E at the worst physical Condition 5 defined. However, Condition 5 for other elements only corresponded to LVR Bands A to D. Some 83% of the LVR bands assigned to the physical conditions were in agreement with those arrived at by the professionals, or differed by only one band.

The conversion of deficiency-based conditions to LVR bands yielded a completely new maintenance-oriented perspective on degradation. The banding was done using a novel ranking and clustering process that identified regions of high variation in LVRs as thresholds of the bands.