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H817 Week 2 Activity 7 Exploring OER Issues

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The 3 articles I have read from the OER reading list were differentiated in date, but included 2 (Hatakka, 2009)  and (Wilson and McAndrew , 2009) as being among the most recent on the list.  The third article read in detail was  Atkins, Seely-Brown and Hammond (2007).

All  3 articles included a definition of the notion of OER:  to provide free access to educational materials, and sharing resources, and 'creating new knowledge rather than reinventing the same resource a number of times in different places' (Atkins,Wilson & McAndrew, 2009).  The Atkins et al report was more general in scope, although commissioned by one of the earlier supporters of OER (Hewlett Foundation) and aimed to describe the development of OER to date, to note the 'major remaining challenges' and to identify the key 'enablers' in the (near) future.  Wilson and McAndrew focussed upon one particular learning environment - 'OpenLearn' as a case study of how educators' use of OER might be improved, and in particular to examine the 'gap' between the open content resources available and the possible 're-purposing of such resources by educators.  Hatakka's study focuses upon the issue of why educators in developing countries were not making use of OERs.

Between the 3 articles it was quite striking that they did not necessarily identify the same issues as being (the most) important.   The 3 issues which I have identified as (potentially) significant are:

  • Relevance - content was the original focus of much of the early attempts to foster 'open content', with the underlying presumption that such content was pedagogically 'neutral'. More recent research focuses upon the 'content + context' as being a fundamentally pairing - open content created for one context is likely to be either inappropriate or not usable in another context, whether it is another country, another educational system or level, or another language context.
  • Awareness, access and digital literacy - it is difficult for both educators and students alike to know where to find suitable 'open source' resources (whether in terms of course/level appropriateness or 'quality' of the content) from the wealth of sources available on the internet at any one time, or perhaps even to know about the existence of some 'open source' sites which could be accessed.
  • Intellectual property issues - institutional use of materials is generally within the bounds of the university community (or VLE) and so covered by institutional licences, but such permissions would not usually cover open access. Educators might be (are?) reluctant to create materials which would run into copyright problems, and/or would be users might be anxious about how to download materials and re-use them legally. If the aim of OER is to enable a by-passing of the expense of developing new courses from scratch by re-purposing learning materials this must be a key issue.

If  intellectual property issues is taken as an example, then there are a few ways in which this is being addressed.  A Creative Commons Search provides a gateway to  services provided by organisations under this licence (though not necessarily only such institutions), while in the UK further and higher education institutions current share 'open' learning and teaching resources via Jorum, and  some individual universities such as Nottingham host open source repositories (Xerte Public E-learning ReposiTory)  which will help educators to search a growing database of open learning resources suitable for students at all levels of study in a wide range of different subjects.   On an individual level the educator can  access those online services which provide access to Web 2.0 open educational resources e.g.  Flickr (images), YouTube (video), Scribd (the written word) and iTunes U (educational materials).

References

Atkins, D.E., Seely-Brown, J. and 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. Available from www.hewlett.org/uploads/files/Hewlett_OER_report.pdf (Accessed  30 March 2013)

Hatakka, M. (2009) Build it and they will come? - Inhibiting factors for reuse of open content in developing countries. In The Electronic Journal on Information Systems in Developing Countries (2009), Vol. 37, No. 5, pp 1-16.  Available from www.ejisdc.org/ojs2/index.php/ejisdc/article/view/545/279 (Accessed on 30 March 2013)

JISC (2013) A Guide to Open Educational Resources [online]. Available from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/programmerelated/2013/Openeducationalresources.aspx (Accessed on 1 April 2013)

Wilson, T. and McAndrew, P. (2009) Evaluating how Higher Education Institutions world-wide plan to use and adapt Open Educational Resources. In International Technology, Education and Development Conference (INTED 2009), 9-11 March, Valencia, Spain.  Available from http://oro.open.ac.uk/view/person/mew3.html#group_2009 (Accessed on 30 March 2013)

 

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