Open Educational Resources

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[edit] Open Educational Resources

The spread of Open Educational Resources (OER) offer many educational opportunities [1] and is said to have the potential to change the playing field when it comes to every individuals right to education [2]. “OERs are positioned to play a transformative role in a world where access to quality education is viewed as a right rather than a privilege” [3]. The term OER is fairly new and was first used by UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (iiep) in 2002. UNESCO defines OERs as “[…] technology-enabled, open provision of educational resources for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for non commercial purposes […]” [4]. The most commonly used definition for OER is: “Open Educational Resources are digitized materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and re-use for teaching, learning and research.” [5]

Even though this definition is vague at best it still gives some insight on the general idea of OERs. The whole idea of OER is based on the Open Source Software movement [6] where software is created and spread under an open license permitting users to use, alter and spread software. The OER definitions do however need some explaining.

The word Open in OER means that the resource should be accessible and free-to-use by anyone (e.g. teachers, learners, organizations etc). The primary audience according to UNESCO is teachers [7] but it is nothing in the definition that exclude students or other stakeholders. The term that the resources should only be free for non commercial use is somewhat problematic; it could be argued that educational organization that use OERs has a commercial agenda by using it but the term most likely refers to selling the OER for its economical value.

Another issue that has to be considered is when a resource can be said to be open. The fact that a resource is free-to-use is clearly not enough, for a resource to be considered open it also has to be widely accessible, meaning users have to be able to access the resource that they need when they need it. This can be done in several ways but the most common way is of course to make the resource accessible via Internet but other delivery forms can also play an important role, e.g. delivering the content via CD-ROMs or DVDs. Another important aspect is that the users have to be able to alter and make adaptations to the resources (e.g. to make the content fit the context of the country etc). This involves a dimension of the resources that sometimes is neglected. If content in the form of e.g. PDF files or Flash files are to be considered open the providers also have to include access to the source files, without the source files adaptations to the material often is impossible.

The concept of educational is perhaps even more problematic. When is a resource considered educational? Educational is most often used very widely and does not exclude material that is not specifically designed for education. Example of OERs specifically designed for education is MIT Open Courseware (http://ocw.mit.edu/) that delivers complete courses for people to use, and as example of educational resources not specifically designed for education is Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org). The general consensus seems to be to include all material that potentially can be used for an educational purpose, and I do not see any reason to exclude material based on lacks of educational merits. This also implies that OERs should be able to be used for both formal and informal education.

Resources refer to material used in education. Most of the debates in academics focus on the actual learning content but the definition of OER also includes tools and implementation resources.

  • Learning Content: Full courses, courseware, content modules, learning objects, collections and journals.
  • Tools: Software to support the development, use, re-use and delivery of learning content including searching and organization of content (e.g. Learning Object Repositories (LOR)), content and learning management systems, content development tools, and on-line learning communities.
  • Implementation Resources: Intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design principles of best practice, and localization of content. [5]

[edit] OER initiatives

Lately there has been a growing supply of OERs available on Internet, both in term of formal course material and informal material (i.e. material not specifically designed for education). Wiley [7] estimated in 2007 that there were over 2500 open access courses (e.g. MIT Open Courseware) available and numerous non-course content (e.g. Wikipedia, YouTube etc.) available for educational organizations to use. The numbers have been constantly growing and the numbers can be expected to be much higher today, only MIT Open Courseware has over 1800 courses available (2008-09-03). A very broad categorization of the OER initiatives can be made by dividing it in to provider and scale of operation:

Image:oer.jpg

Figure 1: Categories of OER providers [8]

Examples of OER initiatives are:

  • UNESCO Open Training Platform (OTP) (http://opentraining.unesco-ci.org/) which is specified on course content for use in developing countries. OPT has currently 2610 learning resources.
  • MERLOT (http://www.merlot.org/) is a free learning object repository with 20471 shared resources. Merlot is a very wide repository with resources about everything from music to criminal justice to physics etc.
  • MIT Open Courseware (http://ocw.mit.edu/), 1800 free-to-use courses including, lectures, assignments, video feeds etc. Users from more then 215 countries have visited MIT Open Courseware [9]

For more OER initatives see OER references

Even though there are some OER initiatives originating from developing countries (e.g. in Brazil, India, South Africa and Vietnam [9][10]) the vast majority of OERs are produced by individuals, organizations or institutions from developed countries [11]. This is seen as somewhat problematic since many of the problems associated with OERs are because the learning material is created for context not relevant to many developing countries. If OERs should reach its full potential a global balance need to be found where developing countries are not confined to being consumers of learning material but also producers (or co-constructors) [1][11]. At the moment most OER initiatives in developing countries are limited to translating and localizing content produced in e.g. Europe or the U.S. (several initiatives have been started to translate MITs courses into Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese [1]). There are of course obstacles like poor infrastructure, lack of local resources, lack of training and support etc. that needs to be overcome before many developing countries fully can participate in the creation of OERs [1]. But if OERs should lead to development in the long run developing countries can not be confined to just consuming knowledge created by the richer parts of the world. OERs from the developed world should rather work as a “catalyst for the production of new, local OER” [1].

[edit] Negative effects of OER use for development

There are several potential negative impacts of OER use in developing countries. The negative impacts are hardly mentioned in the literature though, but are very important if actual development should take place. Considering that much hope is put into the use of OERs the negative sides needs to be discussed so that they are not overlooked.

Depending on what you are trying to achieve different development perspectives can be taken, many much criticised. Many development efforts try to copy the developed world’s assumptions, believes’ and values. This is in my opinion not development, development should rather try and make different cultures blossom within their own cultures, not trying to make them copies of Europe or the US. Here OERs are at risk, as previously mentioned OERs are not culture natural [1]. The creator of the content build in certain believes about the world into the content [12]. If these believes clash with the context where the content is used there is a risk of “watering-out” the countries own culture, or replacing it with a culture transferred via the learning object. Granted, putting that much trust in the impact of OERs might be to read too much into it. However, considering that education is a huge part of a child’s first years it is not that far fetched to believe that what they are taught in their early years will colour the rest of their lives. I do not imply that teachers in developing countries can not judge for themselves the appropriateness of the content, but considering that many international organizations (e.g. UNESCO) see OERs as one of the most important tools to educate the poor and underprivileged caution must be taken. This is also one reason why collaboration between developed and developing countries in content creation is preferred over transfer of content created by the developed world [11].

[edit] References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 UNESCO (iiep): Final forum report." http://learn.creativecommons.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/oerforumfinalreport.pdf 2008-09-01
  2. ↑ Attwell, Graham., and Pumilia, Paolo M. 2007 "The New Pedagogy of Open Content: Bringing Together Production, Knowledge, Development, and Learning." Data Science Journal 6: 211-219.
  3. ↑ Zhang, Dongson; Zhao, J. Leon; Zhou, Lina; and Nunamaker Jay, F., Jr. 2004 "Can E-learning Replace Classroom Learning?" Association for Computing Machinery. Communications of the ACM 47: 75-79
  4. ↑ UNESCO 2002 Forum on the impact of Open Courseware for higher education in developing countries. Final report. Paris, UNESCO
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Hylén, Jan. 2006. Open Educational Resources: Opportunities and challenges. Open Education 2006: Community, culture and content, Utah State University; 49-63
  6. ↑ Nisar, T.M. 2004 . "E-Learning in Public Organizations." Public Personal Management 33 : 79-88
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Wiley, David. 2007 "Open Educational Resources: On the Sustainability of OER initiatives in Higher Education. Paper commissioned by the OECD's Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) for the project on Open Educational Resources. http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/33/9/38645447.pdf
  8. ↑ OECD. "OECD study of OER: forum report." http://www.unesco.org/iiep/virtualuniversity/forumsfiche.php?queryforumspages_id=33 2007-09-01
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Johnstone, Sally M. 2005 "Open Educational Resources Serve the World." Educause Quarterly: 15-18
  10. ↑ "The current state of open educational resources." http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/247 2008-09-04
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Unwin, Tim. 2005 "Towards a framework for the use of ICT in teacher training in Africa." Open Learning 20: 113-130
  12. ↑ Selinger, Michelle. 2004 "Cultural and pedagogical implications of a global e-learning programme." Cambridge Journal of Education 34: 223-239

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