Open educational resources

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Open educational resources or OER are defined by a report to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation as follows:

"OER are teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials or techniques used to support access to knowledge."[1]

iCommons.org describes the origin and meaning of the word as follows:

"The phrase ‘open education resources’ was first coined in 2002 at UNESCO’s Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries. It encompasses several different types of resources, including learning content (courses, lesson plans and learning objects), tools (software that supports the development, management and re-use of content) and implementation resources (the intellectual property licences that promote open licensing and other principles of best practice)."[2]

UNESCO's current interest in OER is centered at its International Institute for Educational Planning, but this site does not appear to define what OER are, except by exhaustive listing of OERs and assistance with creating them.

In his article "The new pedagogy of open content: bringing together production, knowledge development and learning", Graham Attwell writes: "There is no clear agreement on exactly what we mean by Open Content or Open Educational Resources" [3], but he goes on to give an impression of the full range and diversity of the movement.


Contents

[edit] Typical characteristics of OER

The OER Logic Model as recommended by the Hewlett Foundation

[edit] Open

[edit] Open: Cost minimization

OERs are most commonly cost-free. The OER movement generally sets great store in lowering the total cost of ownership, which means that not only should resources and tools be cost-free wherever possible, but also that the medium of their distribution should not presuppose expensive hardware or software. For example, resources which require high bandwidth might cause large internet connection costs in third world countries. So it is good practice for OER creators to look at the wider picture of OER usage and aim at minimizing all possible cost factors.

Issues of cost-minimization may include or disguise issues of cost-shifting. Cost-minimization may mean minimization only for the end-consumer, or it may take a more holistic view. Cost-shifting may mean that costs are shifted away from the end-consumer, producing only an appearance of cost-minimization or a (real) avoidance of profiting out of the end-consumer.

Examples of cost-shifting:

  • A professor releases course materials onto the web under a Creative Commons licence. Consumers have cost-free access. The production of materials was financed by the professor's employer (a university). Ultimately the university bears the costs, both in terms of staff costs and making a web presence available to host the materials.
  • A programmer creates an educational tool and releases it as freeware.[4] Like the professor, the programmer cannot live without an income. The programmer's costs might be shifted to an unrelated commercial activity (e.g. daytime employer, freelance projects) or to related commercial activity (e.g. optional support and services associated with the educational freeware).
  • A website offers a repository of cost-free educational materials. The website's staff and hosting are financed by cash or donations-in-kind from major corporations and private charitable donations.

Cost-shifting in OER is accompanied by measures which spread the costs of production processes. For example, the costs borne by educators are reduced by involving software programmers, legal experts and repository managers in the whole OER production process

Cost-shifting in OER is also accompanied by measures which maximize the cost-efficiency of production processes. Reusability is a core principle here. For example, the reusability of a software licence reduces legal costs without adding any time-related burden to a legal expert.

There is no one economic model which OERs must follow. On the contrary, there is considerable debate and experimentation in this area. What characterises OER production is the move away from the traditional model where a consumer pays the producer for their goods or services.

[edit] Open: Accessibility

Open educational resources are an internet phenomenon, because only the internet can offer the almost zero-cost and universal access that characterizes OER. OER are generally available for public use, without password-protection or registration requirements. Accessibility can also be used in the narrower sense of ensuring that OER are accessible to disabled users.

[edit] Open: Consumer/producer relationship

Openness may also refer to the openness of production: the set of producers is not necessarily closed to or separate from the set of consumers. Not all OER's share this characteristic, but it is a common theme in OER that consumers may become producers and vice-versa. The technical openness of production processes leads to a social openness of the same processes.

[edit] Open: Licences

OER are often characterised by use of certain licences, although this is not a part of their definition. The licencing of OER is rather wide and includes but extends beyond copyleft and free software. Resources which are widely recognized as OER, such as MIT's OpenCourseware, use licences such as CC-BY-SA-NC (a Creative Commons licence which requires attribution, adherence of modifications to the same licence, and restricts to non-commercial use).

In general, OER tend to carry one of the following licences:

It is conceivable that other licences could be used if they achieved similar results, but it is considered good practice to aim for compatibility and standardisation with licencing. The most important criteria of OER licences is that they should permit (i) an indefinite chain of distribution without further permission and (ii) promote re-purposing. However there are no precise definitions.

[edit] Educational

[edit] Educational content

While OER normally have educational content, there is some debate or uncertainty as to the inclusion of very fine-grained resources under the term OER. Fine-grained resources means the smallest possible building blocks of resources, such as images or audio-clips. Images or audio-clips may not have a specifically educational content by themselves, but educational sites may nevertheless collect them and make them available for educational purposes. At the other end of the scale, repositories and tools can be considered "OER", although by themselves they may have no special educational relevance, and it may only be their application to educational resources which makes them educational.


[edit] Resources

Emphasis is laid in all descriptions of OER on the varied and all-encompassing nature of resources. The Hewlett foundation lists the following resource types: "full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials or techniques used to support access to knowledge". iCommons lists "learning content (courses, lesson plans and learning objects), tools (software that supports the development, management and re-use of content) and implementation resources (the intellectual property licences that promote open licensing and other principles of best practice".

One way to list possible resource types is by the skills of the resource producer:

  • Educators: content.
  • Programmers: tools for creating OER content, tools for OER repositories.
  • Legal experts: intellectual property licences.
  • This list cannot be closed; for example, how does one categorize the broader group of people who promote OER. Further, there is an OER interest in experimenting with closing the producer-consumer gap, so perhaps the consumer's activity needs to be listed....

[edit] Where to find OERs

UNESCO's International Institute for Educational Planning is possibly the most authoritative and comprehensive source of information and resources.

OER Commons is one of the largest guides to OER, with over 10,000 resources catalogued, drawn from many other OER sites. OER Commons is managed by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education and financially supported by the Hewlett Foundation, a major benefactor to OER projects.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ↑ Atkins, D., Seely Brown, J., Hammond, A. (2007) A review of the the Open Educational Resources movement: achievements, challenges and new opportunities. http://www.oerderves.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/a-review-of-the-open-educational-resources-oer-movement_final.pdf
  2. ↑ http://icommons.org/2007/03/01/virtual-learning-10-open-education-resources/#more-491
  3. ↑ http://www.knownet.com/writing/weblogs/Graham_Attwell/entries/beijing_paper/7106458966/attach/OpenContentBeijing.rtf
  4. ↑ Cost issues, not licence issues, are the subject of the cost minimization section.
  5. ↑ The Hewlett Foundation definition explicitly lists public domain as a possible licence.


[edit] External links

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