Personal Blogs

3 KEY ISSUES FOR OERs

Accessibility –There are resources out there used in education that are functional and great but as learners learn more and more from their own devices, the accessibility to these features on their devices needs to be considered.  Example: Mural.ly is a collaborative tool for visual people and offers a facility where contributions can be made by others to develop the resource or given access via a link.  It will not open on iPads or on some Internet Browsers.  This results in significant access issues.  Therefore it is important to identify resources that can be accessed in multiple ways not just for accessibility but also for sustainability which we will look more into later on in this blog post. 

A very basic example of this in practice would be when repositories would have word documents uploaded.  These could be high in data size or be incompatible to other systems therefore for reading material of this type it would be advisable to be in pdf format as this is a far more universal viewing format that is also lower in file size.

Sustainability – For OERs to be sustainable the key requirement is growing a community that both values and uses them.  Developing a culture is a key feature of this.  Educators once making contact and having experience with OERs will like them as they can gain kudos for the quality of their resource or gain constructive advice on how they can be developed.   They will also have a bank of knowledge and shared information that they can access and utilise.   It takes time to develop resources and in a world where educators are becoming busier the use of OERs makes practical sense.  It gives more time for the educator to adapt and identify how they are to express this knowledge with their learners.

Additionally, time saved will result in money saved.  Budget holders in educations institutions will like this.  The use of OERs offers the opportunity to raise the quality of teaching as high quality and strong functioning resources can be shared and the saved time can be invested in the quality of how this is delivered and learning supported.

Culture – The major concerns within educators with sharing their resources includes a lack of confidence the quality of their resources and how they will be perceived, discouraged by criticism and a concern over the ownership and rights of their resources.  As the range of OERs increases these issues are being broken down bit by bit.

Quality – OERs can be categorised as Big and Small.  There is an expectation that small OERs will be of lower production quality and that they will be developed and reused to meet the needs of other educators and learners.  All can benefit from this as there are many resources that can act as a base and save development time.  Once educators can see this mutually beneficial sharing of resources the culture will continue to change to accept this.   These OERs can support the higher production value of Big OERs which are unlikely to be adapted or changed.  Tes-Connect allows users to access resources through download and re-use and a quick graphical indicator and comments can be added so there is some ability to develop an OER within the community of users with feedback on quality of resource in a productive setting.

References:

McGill, L., Falconer, I., Dempster, J.A., Littlejohn, A. and Beetham, H. Journeys to Open Educational Practice:  UKOER/SCORE Review Final Report. JISC, 2013  https://oersynth.pbworks.com/w/page/60338879/HEFCE-OER-Review-Final-Report

OU and William&Flora Hewlett Foundation. (2014). Hypothesis. Available: http://oerresearchhub.org/collaborative-research/hypotheses/. Last accessed 24th March 2014.