Personal Blogs

Having read the Journeys to Open Educational Practice report from 2013 and filtered it through the prism of my own experience I have identified three issues affecting OER that I regard as the most important. They are interrelated and the measuring of their importance is a difficult thing, beyond the scope of a blog post. Nevertheless I have ordered them here.

• 3) Relationship to Access priorities. I have experience of working within the framework of Access programs in higher education and they often have frustratingly specific targets to do with the proportion of students from a target background in the student population as a whole. I can see issues arising here that would affect the adoption of a philosophy of greater openness, whether it be to do with resources or practices. Once a project starts heading for mainstream adoption it will need to be measured somehow, to determine how successful it has been, and the question will arise as to how this form of openness shall be measured. It can (and has been) proved that an OER rich practice improves learner satisfaction but has it facilitated the retention of learners from a less-represented minority? This is a greater challenge and, increasingly, a priority of HE administrators. Certain opportunities that might struggle to justify themselves via these measurements might slip beyond reach because they become deprioritised.
• 2) Institutional ambition. The greater the cost involved with creating a resource the greater the interest from institutions in taking credit for the initiative. This logic will never stop being true and the effort o promote the use of OER will always have to contend with this. There will always be pressure operating against certain forms of openness. It was interesting to note the popularity of video as an open resource. It is one of the more expensive resources to create.
• 1) Over reliance on individual champions. The report noted the reliance on individual champions, and the occasional use of the opposite approach, top down enforcement. The former is a far more organic approach and is the more likely to succeed, in my opinion. The difficulty arises because there is no consistency to the emergence of individual champions. An over reliance on them will, inevitably, lead to a patchy and sporadic structure. There will alway be a tension between the great strengths of having passionate individual champions and the dangers of an over-reliance upon them.

These three issues that I have identified are ones that quite possibly have no solution. They are inevitable tensions that need to be managed, but can not be neatly solved. This is not to be hopeless and despairing to the situation, but rather to recognise long term challenges so as to be prepared for a sustainable future.