Big OER - Major institutional project in open education such MIT's Open CourseWare.
Little OER - Smaller individual outputs produced as a by-product of everyday work.
Benefits | Drawbacks | |
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Big OER |
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Little OER |
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Big OER - Major institutional project in open education such MIT's Open CourseWare.
Little OER - Smaller individual outputs produced as a by-product of everyday work.
Benefits | Drawbacks | |
---|---|---|
Big OER |
|
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Little OER |
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|
Change MOOC
http://change.mooc.ca/index.html
This MOOC was a research project by National Research Centre of Canada's PLE service and the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute. Looking through the course, each week was produced a different guest "speaker", not necessarily connected with either organisation with 3 course facilititators co-ordinating the overall course.
This most fits the USU model, being small scale and co-ordinated by a small central team with a number of volunteers providing materials.
There is very little direct information on the site on how it operates in terms of course creation as it is a single course however.
Coursera
https://www.coursera.org
Coursera contains a collection of open courses produced not by coursera in the main, but through partner universities. The coursera site boldly highlights the fact that the site contains 338 courses from 63 universities. The site is actively recruiting for a growing team of employees.
In some ways this follows the rice model, in that coursera just host the content and leave co-ordination of the materials to be produced to the universities. However, as the site isn't open to anyone to contribute and university vendors appear to develop courses in partnership with coursera who provide the technical support in creation, the MIT model may be more appropriate.
Jorum is a site where educators share materials and can find other shared materials. As such no co-ordination on the materials is undertaken by the site itself, it is solely a hosting platform.
As such Jorum very much follows the rice model.
The way Jorum works is very clearly outlined on the front page of the site.
OpenLearn
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/
The Open University's OpenLearn platform publishes a number of courses and materials produced by the Open University for open access. The aim is to publish a selection rather than the full open universities collection of courses.
This therefore fits the USU model, where a small team from the organisation helps to produce and publish a small number of courses per year.
3 key issues relating to Open Education Resources are:
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:
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:
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:
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.
Having just moved house I'm now a few week's behind with H817, but finally in a position to get going again...
Here's my prezi for activity 3.
This looks at some of the flavours of openness currently in education and considers digital scholars.
I'm currently studying H817 of the OU's MAODE, which includes the Open Education course as one block of the course.
I currently work in e-learning, producing and managing distance learning wine courses for the Wine & Spirit Education Trust in London. One of the main drivers behind my study is therefore to get an insight into developments within e-learning including the latest innovations and open courses to feed into my own practice.
I'm unsure whether open courses may be directly applicable to my practice, but I suspect there will be ideas from them that can be applied.
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