3 key issues relating to Open Education Resources are:
- Financial Sustainability
- Intellectual Property
- Student Support
Financial Sustainability
Many of the current projects concerning OER's have been funded by foundations such as the Williams and Flora Hewlett Foundation (Atkins et al, 2007). However, as Smith and Casserly (2006) highlight these "foundations are unlikely to maintain their support over long peroids of time".
The question is then raised as to how these types of projects can finance themselves in the long term and what the incentives will be to organisations to create and maintain them.
Some possible business models that have been suggested include:
- Loss leaders for organisations that sell content where they place some of their content available for open access to increase sales and revenue for the premium content (Smith and Casserly, 2006)
- Professional associations taking responsibility for development and maintainence (Smith and Casserly, 2006)
- Stewardship funds from colleges using the materials on fee-based courses where they pay a small amount to the creator to maintain and upgrade the materials (Smith and Casserly, 2006)
- Membership base consortia sharing the upkeep costs (Atkins et al, 2007)
- Institutions maintaining OER as part of their general courseware as a marginal low cost derivative (Atkins et al, 2007)
- Using students to create and enhance resources (Atkins et al, 2007).
Intellectual Property
The majority of existing education content is released under traditional all rights reserved copyright laws where "any piece of work not affirmatively released from copyright by its creator is automatically copyrighted upon production" (Smith and Casserley, 2006). This directly restricts reuse and adaption of OER material unless they are specifically licenced for such use. In particular, it requires institutions to "scrub material to be sure that materials licensed for use in their formal community" are not released to the general public when materials are made open (Atkins et al, 2007).
Some solutions to this issue that have been applied are:
- Use of creative commons licences to free materials "from the automatically applied copyright" (Smith and Casserley, 2006) and "specifically grant some of their rights to the public".
- Applying concepts of "fair use" from the copyright laws. This is however, legally untested, with questions on whether Google Book Search's "displaying of excerpts of text... constitutes copyright violation" (Atkins et al, 2007)
This is, however, a complex issue that will require further investigation.
Student Support
Removing the "human teacher makes [OER c] different from the normal course delivered in a classroom or at a distance" (Smith and Casserly, 2006). As such any course following this model would require "tools to guide and support" learners.
Some solutions that have been proposed or used for this include:
- Question sets, help buttons, review materials and assessments with feedback (Smith and Casserly, 2006)
- Communication tools to help learners communicate (Smith and Casserly, 2006). This could enable the establishment of "self-educating communities" (Burbules, 2006).
Other possibilities may also arise as pedagogies develop alongside OER.
References
Atkins, D.E., Brown-Seely, J. & Hammond, A.L., (2007). A review of the open educational resources (OER) movement: Achievements, challenges, and new opportunities. Report to The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
Burbules, N. C. (2006) "Self-Educating Communities: Collaboration and Learning Throughout the Internet," in Learning in Places: The Informal Education Reader, Zvi Bekerman, Nicholas C. Burbules, and Diana Silberman-Keller, eds. (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 273–284.
Smith, M.S. & Casserly, C.M., 2006. The promise of open educational resources. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 38(5), 8–17.