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Owen Barritt

Big and Little OER

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Edited by Owen Barritt, Monday, 22 Apr 2013, 13:41

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.

BenefitsDrawbacks
Big OER
  • Can easy have backing of major institutions with institutional branding.
  • Can be developed strategically, covering major topics.
  • Can pool resources of many stakeholders as necessary
  • Can deliver a common set of resources for all courses/topics if required.
  • Can target large audiences with potential for detailed planning.
  • Can cover large amounts of materials.
  • Costly, requiring backing of institutional budgets or trust funds.
  • One size fits all model across all individuals' work within institution/department.
  • Range of media presented may be limited.
  • Planning required to ensure materials meet requirements of all stakeholders.
  • Larger topics may be less suitable for reuse outside the organisation.
Little OER
  • Generally a by-product of individuals' existing work.
  • Materials can be developed at any time using any available tool in any style.
  • More adapted to long-tail approaches allowing very special interest materials to be produced for small audiences.
  • Materials naturally produced in a range of medias by a range of individuals.
  • Collectively have potential to reach a wider audience than Big OER although individual audiences may be small.
  • Smaller topics may be more suitable for reuse in a range of contexts.
  • Generally unplanned with no guarantees of audience/use.
  • Unlikely to produce much consistency in style between materials.
  • Needs for general topic materials may be sidelined by more specialised topics.
  • Reputation of materials' authors may not be as clear as for major institutions.
  • Generally only cover a very small section of a topic.

 

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Owen Barritt

Applying Sustainability Models

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Edited by Owen Barritt, Monday, 22 Apr 2013, 13:41

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
http://www.jorum.ac.uk

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.

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Owen Barritt

Key Issues in OER

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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.

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Owen Barritt

Flavours of Openness in Education

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Edited by Owen Barritt, Saturday, 6 Apr 2013, 11:43

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.

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Owen Barritt

Why I'm Studying the Open Education Course

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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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