Open educational resources

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Definition

“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.” (Hewlett Foundation), retrieved 18:55, 23 May 2007 (MEST).

By "open educational resources" we understand:

Open courseware and content;
Open software tools;
Open material for e-learning capacity building of faculty staff;
Repositories of learning objects;
Free educational courses.

(OECD), retrieved 18:55, 23 May 2007 (MEST)

The Open Educational Resources (OER) Initiative

By Alain Senteni

In July 2001, the UNESCO, in association with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and WCET, the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications, convened a forum on the Impact of Open Courseware (OCW) on Higher Education in Developing Countries. The OCW initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a principal point of interest in the forum, consists of providing educational resources for free consultation and non-commercial usage by university and college faculty members as well as students, with permission to produce adapted versions. It also includes technology to support open access to and meaningful use of these resources.

After the forum, where Mauritius was represented, the VCILT became a mirror site of the MIT-OCW, availing the MIT open contents across the University of Mauritius since 2002. The problems faced at that time to disseminate the open contents and encourage the academics to contextualize and integrate the resources into their lectures, were more visible than the solutions it provided. Opening resources created double-bind1 situations and conflicts with existing institutional culturess and practices. Academics were not at ease using foreign educational material, IPR remained a concern, a culture of competition, created from the primary school, is still prevailing in Mauritius, groupwork is not encouraged. Education represents an investment for the families who expect return on investment and value for money, equating the mind of the population to individualism and competition rather than collaboration.

The Open Educational Resources (OER) Initiative, as the participants agreed to name it after the forum, is based on a philosophical view of knowledge as a collective social product to become a social property. However, five years ago, the OER initiative seemed to regard the sharing of knowledge, mainly considered as a final product rather than as a collaborative dynamic process. Although issues of contextualisation (i.e. re-processing) and knowledge-creation were raised, they were never central to the sharing process but rather left at the initiative of local stakeholders and institutions, who did not know most of the times what to do with it. From 2001 to 2007, after the MIT OCW, other major american universities joined up the project, Rice Connexions Project, and Utah State participated in several projects of the emerging OCW Consortium. Implicitly, the conception/production engine remained the prerogative of international organisations and institutions from the North.

The OER report published in February 2007 by Atkins, Brown and Hammond (2007) at the request of the Hewlett Foundation shows the evolution of this worldwide project, that targets educators, students, and self-learners worldwide, with the objective to help equalize access to knowledge and educational opportunities across the world. The report defines the OER as a strategic initiative to expand people's substantive freedoms through the removal of "unfreedoms": poverty, limited economic opportunity, inadequate education and access to knowledge, deficient health care, and oppression. It praises the extent to which OER has moved education institutions, not just individuals and small groups, to embrace a new culture of IT-enabled contribution and sharing and to help shift faculty perspectives from "this courseware is mine" to "this courseware is for (open) mining".

The report addresses also additional approaches to sustainability, including the following:

Encourage institutions, rather than just individual pioneer-faculty, to buy into the OER movement so that institutional resources will be committed to sustain it.
Situate OER collections not as distinct from the courseware environment for the formally enrolled students but as a low marginal cost derivative of the routinely used course preparation and management systems. Increase the amount of course preparation and management systems that service closed and open institutional courseware.
Encourage membership-based consortia (along the lines of Internet2) to distribute and to share cost and expertise.
Explore roles for students in creating, enhancing, and adopting OER. Consider an "OER Corps" in which students receive training, small stipends, and prestige to assist in material preparation, enhancement, and use (especially in historically disadvantaged domestic communities and developing countries).
Consider a voluntary (or mix of voluntary and paid) wiki-like model, in which OER is the object of micro-contributions from many. This approach raises complex issues of quality, but much work on collective "converging to better" is under way.
Examine ways that social software can be used to capture and structure user commentaries on the material. More generally, find ways to instrument the use of the material with special attention to capturing problems encountered by diverse student communities. Do the same for teachers using, remixing or repurposing the material.

The report presents the next phase of the project, that will aim at consolidating understanding, technology, and incentive from multiple threads of activity into an Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure (OPLI):

A socio-technical initiative to form an open participatory learning infrastructure is critical to this culture of learning. By open participatory learning infrastructure we mean the institutional practices, technical infrastructure, and social norms that allow a smooth operation of globally distributed, high-quality open learning. We include the word "participatory" to emphasize that the focus is not just on information access, but on the role of technology in supporting the social nature of learning. An OPLI can leverage diversity of use, radical repurposing of content, and critical reflection.

This perspective is consistent with collaboratories in science and humanities communities and the social software and the Web 2.0 movement more generally. Such an infrastructure supports diverse ecosystems of people and learning resources that could have profound implications for preparing people for a rapidly evolving knowledge-based world, one demanding creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurialism from us all. (Atkins, Brown & Hammond, 2007, p.10)

Such recommendations for an infrastructure supporting ecosystems of people and learning resources, meets our own stand for educational ecologies, stressing the necessity to reconcile a culture of knowledge with one of development process (Senteni, 2004). We insisted particularly on the importance of overcoming the dichotomy between learning and the development of societal practices, in line with a fractal conception of learning and development in a globalised society as the one outlined by (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002). Infrastructure supporting ecosystems of people and learning resources should allow to bridge the gap between micro and macro levels of analysis of educational structures and processes, and to bring closer implementors, stakeholders and policy-makers in integrated decision-making evolutionary frameworks.

The ADEA-WGDEOL, an example of policy and management divide

At the Arusha Biennal Meeting in 2001, the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) expressed its concerns about the lack of capacity shown in Africa for going to pilot to scale. Africa has benefited several pilot innovative projects sensitive to the needs of learners, without ever being able to scale-up and mainstream. Mainstreaming involves a number of processes such as moving from the margins and going to scale. More important, it is facilitated by such things as gaining official recognition and public acceptance, as well as having access to regular public funding and being an integral part of the examination system (Wright, 2003).

However, through its four pillars (capacity building, coordination, research and advocacy), the ADEA Working Group on Distance Education and Open Learning (WGDEOL) was geared towards sensitizing all stakeholders ranging from practitioners to policy-makers about the importance of ODL methodologies and related innovations in the educational scenario and to demonstrate the effectiveness of ODL and more generally, of the introduction of ICTs in education. This Working Group was also concerned with training local expertise, developing forums and mechanisms for the sharing of experiences, research, and good practices in ODL.

The WGDEOL can be taken as a good example of "policy & management divide" whose consequences worsen the well known "digital divide". While the link between working groups such as WGDEOL and grass-root implementors in local institutions should be quite strong and dynamic, the handing down of ODL policies defined at its international (macro) level has always suffered a lack of commitment when it came to grass-roots implementation (micro level) and re-thinking of policies and practices that are the convention in traditional classroom-based education (meso level).

Central commitment, ownership, responsibility and participation of the whole educational community in the full process of integrating ODL along with systematized capturing and sharing of knowledge on the upgrading process, should be at the centre of the scaling up process. Moving from pilot projects to mainstream nationwide scales of action requires implementors participation in the conception, development, financing, and upgrading of educational systems. This is maybe how ODL could become successful and sustainable.

In this respect, an important step has been taken by COL when involving in the decision making process of the VUSSC project, not only government stakeholders (interlocutors) but also grass-roots level educators (implementors) in holistic teams, sharing decision making mechanisms.

The Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth (VUSSC)

At a meeting in Halifax (2000), the Education Ministers from the small states of the Commonwealth, fearing that their countries would be left behind in the online world for want of the critical mass of human and financial resources to exploit the new technology, proposed collective action in the form of a virtual university for small states. The keywords were �$B!F�(Busing existing structures and capacity', the point was to support the development of existing institutions rather than to create new ones. The Halifax Declaration on the virtual university for small states of the Commonwealth (14th CCEM, 2000) mandated the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) to develop a proposal for a virtual university. This was presented to the 15th CCEM in Edinburgh in October 2003 and endorsed by the Ministers of Education, who then invited COL to manage the continued development of the project as part of its next TYP (2003-6).

VUSSC objectives were set so as

to help small states - or even institutions within one state - work together to produce, adapt and use courses and learning materials that would be difficult for one state to produce alone, and
to expand access to learning, to help partner countries to become leaders in education reform and cutting edge in ICTs, as well as full fledge players in global development.

The model chosen for VUSSC was a network rather than an institution, a network with multiple nodes of activity that will contribute to strengthen existing post-secondary institutions. Our own participation to VUSSC is very consistant with the clustering policy developed at the university of Mauritius (UoM) during the last few years with the Lifelong Learning Cluster (LLC), clustering the three Centres of the university without questioning their autonomy nor adding further�.A�N layers of bureaucracy1.

Amongst most other large scale ODL projects for the developing world, VUSSC deserves a special mention for actually applying grass-root level empowerment policies discussed in the previous sections. Anticipating on the OER report recommendations, a wiki-like model in which OER content is the object of micro-contributions from many, was experimented at the first VUSSC course developers �$B!F�(Bbootcamp', held at the VCILT in August 2006, with implementors from fifteen countries. As mentioned in the OER report, this approach raises complex issues of quality, but collective �$B!F�(Bconverging to better' is under way. In a first step, the actual involvement of educators in �$B!F�(Blearning by doing' content development takes precedence over other issues, such as reliability and quality assurance.

Discussion

Daniel K. Schneider's view

I always was a bit sceptical about this movement. IMHO the key issue is not so much teaching materials, but rather:

helping teachers to acquire some sound (but easy) vocabulary of [[instructional design model]s (i.e. learn more about learning and teaching).
encouraging everybody to share, in particular rich public institutions, e.g. what I am doing with this wiki ;). There can be a need for central open content based digital libraries, but I rather feel that we all together are already a library.
encourgae thild world teachers to make their own blend of teaching materials (a good teacher usually should understand what he is teaching, and putting together stuff even if it's not perfect will help).

An other reason for my scepticism is their top-down approach. It doesn't work in most countries and for various reasons which I won't discuss here. The history of bringing educational technology into the educational system started over 40 years ago and globally speaking it still didn't happen....

Btw, the most recent trend is Participatory Learning Infrastructure (OPLI), a step in the right direction. Atkins, Brown and Hammon (2007) does mention Learning Theory, Participatory Systems Architecture, Cyberinfrastructure-Enhanced Humanities, etc. in addition to "Open Contents" that were the hallmark of open educational resources. I believe that they should focus on a truly participatory systems architecture, on the technical side start with a light-weight services-based infrastructure based on web widgets, social software, etc. An enterprise kind of SOA will be too heavy, also initiatives like E-framework may also open up possibilities.

Links

Indexes

OER Grapevine (good list of OER resources)