In a pub today! Although better go easy as sitting next to an Arabian gent this afternoon.
I took the summary of thoughts as my starting point
"Big OERs are institutionally generated ones that arise from projects such as OpenLearn. These are usually of high quality, contain explicit teaching aims, presented in a uniform style and form part of a time-limited, focused project with portal and associated research and data.
Little OERs are the individually produced, low cost resources. They are produced by anyone, not just educators, may not have explicit educational aims, have low production quality and are shared through a range of third party sites and services." (Weller, 2010)
And I thought straight away - thats me! I'm little OER (makes a change to be little anything!). In fact I've been doing little OER for years, pretty much since I started teaching in school (previously I trained adults)
Liking to be concise I decided to do a table.
| Positives | Negatives | |
|---|---|---|
| Big | Lots of funding, top quality resources, huge potential range of courses, links to further study/certified courses, Big repository = big traffic | Mainly for HE resources, further content may require payment |
| Little | Anyone can produce, free to host,resources in many repositories | Quality of tools likely to be lower, a resource alone is not a lesson, often authors have time constraints which prevent completion |
Weller, Martin (2010). Big and little OER. In: OpenED2010: Seventh Annual Open Education Conference, 2-4 November 2010, Barcelona, Spain.