This is a response to h817, Block 2, Activity 7: Exploring OER issues.
I have been considering what the three main issues in OER are for the last week or so. Before I attempted activity 3 last week I had a look at some of the posts by my fellow students. A wide range of issues were highlighted but the same few kept cropping up again and again. Having read through four articles from the suggested reading for this task it seems that the authors consensus is pretty much the same as the MOOC students. Issues with copyright and licensing kept cropping up, as did technological and organizational concerns, as well as funding and quality issues. As such, my list of key issues reads as follows:
- Funding
- Content
- Copyright
Funding:
Although creating an OER course involves no additional funding after the initial production cost, these costs can be quite substantial (software, hardware, hosting, human resource), especially if you consider the amount of courses that will be produced. As Wiley points out “How do we keep funding activities whose main purpose is to be free of charge once foundation funding goes away?”(Wiley, 2005). Downes highlighted several funding models to combat this:
- Endowment Model
- Membership Model
- Donations Model
- Conversion Model
- Contirbutor-Pay Model
- Sponsorhip Model
- Institutional Model
- Governmental Model
- Pertnerships & Exchanges Model (Downes, 2007)
Mozilla Grants has awarded over 2m in grants to open source development since 2006. Some smaller scale crowd source funding include sites such as Pledgie and Kickstarter.
Content:
The quality of content produced for open learning is always going to be a key issue. Institutions will need to develop their own course design standards. Is the course easily accessible? Is it adaptable to local language, context and curriculum (Wilson & McAndrew, 2009)? Has it been properly reviewed before publication? These courses have a lifespan, will they be updated when necessary? The Open Source Initiative is anon-profit corporation that sees themselves as a standards body for quality in open source content. Mohammed-Nabil Sabry of the French University of Egypt suggested a shift from the ‘provider/user’ paradigm to a more community based, collaborative structure as he discussed adapting OERs at the 2005 UNESCO conference (Downes, 2007). This could facilitate a shift from ‘knowledge for all’ to ‘knowledge by all’ which seems to be the road that OER will ultimately lead to.
Copyright:
Each institution needs to develop its own policies and standards (Caswell, Henson, Jensen & Wiley, 2008). These standards include intellectual property policies and faculty release agreements . Copyright issues are always going to be important in the development of online content. “While ‘open’ on the one hand may mean ‘without cost’, it does not on the other hand mean ‘without conditions’”(Downes, 2007). Most OER content is licensed by Creative Commons, but will the user understand or comply with the license requirements (Caswell, Henson, Jensen & Wiley, 2008)? The idea of intellectual property is also prevalent. Does the published material remain the property of the person who produced it?
Examples of open source licenses include Apache License, MIT License, and Mozilla Public License.
References:
Caswell, T. et al., (2008) Open educational resources: Enabling universal education. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 9(1), 1–4.
Wilson, T. and McAndrew, P. (2009) Evaluating how five higher education instituions worldwide plan to use and adapt open educational resources' Proceedings of INTED2009 Conference. 9-11 March 2009, Valencia, Spain. ISBN:978-84-612-7578-6
Attwell, G. & Pumilia, P.M. (2007) The New Pedagogy of Open Content: Bringing Together Production, Knowledge, Development, and Learning. Data Science Journal, 6, 211- 219.
Downes, S. (2007). Models for sustainable open educational resources. Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects, 3. Retrieved November 26, 2007 from:http://www.ijklo.org/Volume3/IJKLOv3p029-044Downes.pdf