Personal Blogs

Sustainability

“Sustainability in relation to OER is closely linked to the business model or approach that an individual, group or institution adopts to release, manage and support OER. It is not just about sustaining existing OER but about embedding processes and transforming practices to support ongoing OER production and release.” (McGill, 2013)

While the sharing of materials and OER seems to have definite financial benefits for students it is yet to been seen or ’proved’ that there are financial benefits for the institutions and this could pose a problem for smaller institutions that do not have the financial resources of larger institutions. For smaller institutions to justify giving away materials for free there must be some benefits for the institution and a way to make this sustainable. Stakeholders can be wary when an organisations decides to freely give away course content, learning objects or making entire courses free and open because they believe this makes no sense from a financial perspective. Additional costs such as staff/student training can also be a cause for concern. Adding OER to the institution's policies, budget, business plan could alleviate some of the financial concers or issues that can hinder sustainability.

The quality and respectability of OER

Who monitors what courses and materials are freely available to students or potential students? Will students/organisations only want materials or courses from certain universities, the Oxfords, the Cambridges, the Harvards, the MITs of the world? Are materials designed by a ‘big’ university in a certain field ‘better’ than materials designed by a new up-and-coming organisation?

Badges could go some way to solve this as could a standardised OER credit valuation and transfer system like the ECTS (European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System) but on a global scale.

Anecdote

I introduced my friend to Coursera and after having a quick look he decided it was “amazing”. He then proceeded to look for courses in his areas of interest and discovered he could pay $49 to get a certificate. His method of search quickly changed and he asked “Is xxx a good university?” He was now only interested in getting a certificate from a good/well known/Oxbridge/Ivy League organisation. At one point he started to look at courses that weren’t even remotely connected to his original area of interest but were run by good universities.

Assessment and accreditation

Accurate and transferable assessment and certification is an issue for OER globally as well as in each individual country. Many certified courses have no actual value when it comes to credit transfer outside of the university giving the certification. This becomes an even larger issue when the credit needs to transfer over borders. Again, a global version of ECTS (European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System) could be useful or a monitoring body that evaluates the assessment but who would do the monitoring? Also, badges are gaining popularity and respectability in the elearning and OER world so they are, at the very least, a big step in the right direction.

Some further issues, answers and solutions are suggested in the following articles from January 2015

http://www.openeducationeuropa.eu/en/paper/assessment-certification-and-quality-assurance-open-learning

References

McGill, L. (2013) Sustainability [online] Available at https://openeducationalresources.pbworks.com/w/page/26789871/Sustainability (Accessed 29 March 2015)

Open Education Europa (2015) eLearning Papers ISSN: 1887-15429 [online] Available at http://www.openeducationeuropa.eu/en/paper/assessment-certification-and-quality-assurance-open-learning (Accessed 28 March 2015)