Open Educational Resources - A Review

"Open Educational Resources — Opportunities and Challenges for Higher Education”
Li Yuan; Sheila MacNeill; Wilbert Kraan
JISC CETIS
http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/images/0/0b/OER_Briefing_Paper.pdf

Review by Woon Kooi Lim

Reading this Article
As they have outlined, a number of approaches – theoretical, practical and
researched, are relevant to effective develop and distribute resources for teaching and learning. The first section of this article looks in detail the conceptual and contextual issues of Open Educational Resources (OER), while section 2 a review of current OER initiatives, their scale, approaches, main issues and challenges. Moving on from theory to practice, section 3 presents discussion on trends and emerging in Open Educational Resources with respect to future research and activities.
The JISC CETIS (JISC Centre for Educational Technology & Interoperability Standards)is a JISC funded service that has long been researching educational technology and covering the field’s latest developments under a CC BY-NC-SA license. One of their latest publications is a briefing paper on open educational resources (OER) titled, “Open Educational Resources - Opportunities and Challenges for Higher Education” and authored by Li Yuan, Sheila MacNeill, and Wilbert Kraan. According to Li, the briefing paper “Look at the latest developments and trends in Open Educational Resources (OER)initiatives worldwide” and serves as “a quick introduction to funding bodies, institutions and educators who are interested in OER initiatives. The paper includes three sections:
a)"Open Educational Resources — Opportunities and Challenges for Higher Education”
the conceptual and contextual issues of Open Educational Resources;
b) current OER
initiatives: their scale, approaches, main issues and challenges; and
c) trends emerging in Open Educational Resources, with respect to future research and activities.” (Jane Park ,2008).
They also explain their reasons for initiating and completing the study.“It appears
that OER will have a significant impact on managing and accessing the existing
repositories and in taking these initiatives forward as part of a global movement. They thought it might be useful to carry out a review of OERs that might benefit the JISC community in planning funding programs and in opening up discussions on future
research directions concerning the use and re-use of digital content.
The main focus seems to be (apart from section 4.2) on formal learning and
formal educational systems. It considered the possibility that future OERs might derive from general information sources (orders of magnitude greater in volume) that are harvested and contextualised for learning purposes? It might be worth exploring the idea that the Web will become a great repository of potential learning resources that come from commerce, industry, special interest groups and so on, and have little or no input from the educational community at all. Because the providers will be motivated to maintain the currency of their area of interest, it is likely that the materials will be self maintaining.
“We should be looking at a world where Virtual Learning Enviroments (VLEs),
repositories, Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and interoperability issues etc are things of the past. Where the role of the tutor is to facilitate and support the learning process, not provide the learning resources and where education operates globally”(Tony Toole, 2008).
Looking at the latest developments and trends in Open Educational Resources
(OER) initiatives worldwide, JISC has a long term record of interest in sharing and reusing digital content and has already supported many institutional repository projects in the provision of free access to teaching and learning materials in Higher Education or Further Education such as Jorum (Free online repository service for teaching and support staff in UK further and Higher Education Institutions). It appears that OER will have a significant impact on managing and accessing the existing repositories and in taking these initiatives forward as part of a global movement. It might be useful to carry out a review of OERs that might benefit the JISC community in planning funding programs and in opening up discussions on future research directions concerning the use and re-use of digital content.
They took much longer than they expected due to the complexity and rapid
development of OERs. “In the last few months, we have studied several well known OER
projects, such as MIT OCW, OpenLearn, Rice Connexions and have drawn invaluable
lessons from them”. ( Li Yuan, 2008 )
This briefing paper is an initial attempt to get some input from the wider JISC
community and get further debate started around the OER initiatives. It is intended to be a fluid document since the landscape on this subject is changing so rapidly at present. One of the ways we would like to keep it current would be to draw a group of people who are interested in OER together to continue to explore the issues, to share some thoughts and to participate in their discussions.
Have they considered the possibility the future OERs might derive from general
information? Why have most learning design approaches to date focused on content ?
(Revenscroft et.al, 2005). Large –sum of money have been invested into creating digital content in their resources , marking it up according to standards and making it available via repositories, VLEs and the like. But making content easily available and accessible does not lead to learning in the same that opening a library does not lead to a literate local community. Content only become ‘alive’ when it is intergrated and related to meaningful learning and pedagogical process. An anology of this point can be made through a comparison with our everyday use of a search engine such as Google. With Google we nearly always find some relevent content that has not undergone any complicated technical preparation to make it ‘findable’, they are just other web pages. Its power rests in the way it operates an ambient and accessible technology that allows us to get what we want when we need it in a way that seamlessly links with our behaviour. What we need for e-learning are tools that link as seamlessly with our teaching-learning behaviour as Google does with our everyday digital behaviour. They acknowledged that there are still considerable barriers to reusing educational content not least of which is IPR. However JISC are not intending to use this call to fund and develop a license structure, rather it is intended to support institutions to develop a process for licensing- whether that be CC or any other type of licence that enables open access to content. Buying licenses is not a sustainable model, changing practice is.
Clearly there is still a risk that institutions and individuals will balk at the idea of “giving away” resources with potential value during a time of recession. However they need to realise that the potential value of new students and enhanced institutional andindividual reputation is potentially of greater value than that of the content. This point was neatly illustrated by Patrick McAndrew’s impromptu presentation which included real evidence of the benefit to the OU of the Hewlett funded Open Learn project. So while the immediate aim of this call is the online release of existing UK HE learning content licensed for worldwide open use and repurposing the real goal of this programme is to help institutions develop processes and policies that result in sustainable open access to content. (David Kernohan, 2008) They also outlined the technical infrastructure approach that JISC are proposing for the OER Programme. Rather than mandating the use of Institutional Repositories and specific licenses, standards and application profiles a more lightweight approach to technical infrastructure is being explored. Content may be released anywhere, in any format, under any appropriately open license however the onus will be on the individual projects to ensure that their content is discoverable, accessible, reusable, attributable, copyright cleared, openly available and supported by stable URLs and a minimum set of tags.
To balance this , anything goes approach there will also be a centralised
aggregation of content in JorumOpen. However at this stage it is yet to be decided
whether this means all content must be deposited in JorumOpen or linked there. This
aggregation of content will enable JISC and HEFCE to showcase the outputs of the
programme and will hopefully also provide the potential to build rich services on the
aggregated resources. This is a relatively new approach to programme infrastructure and there is still much to be discussed and decided, in particular what constitutes the minimal technical requirements for tagging and persistent identifiers.
The trick here is to balance openness with consistency. The programme will
attempt to stitch together an infrastructure based on existing workflows, commonly used tools and the services that can be built around them. It’s not just about the content but the role of content in social networks and it’s not about forcing change but about supporting those that already want to change. (Amber Thomas, 2008)
Li Yuan who presented a summary of her whitepaper Open Educational Resources
Opportunities and Challenges for Higher Education has not going to go into the detail of his presentation her as her whitepaper which has already been extensively blogged about and their slides area available on the OER session wiki page. They have review two presentations from Peter Douglas on the forthcoming JISC commissioned study on business cases for sharing e-learning materials being undertaken by Intrallect and Lou McGill and from Patrick McAndrew on Open University’s OpenLearn project. “Good intentions: improving the evidence base in support of sharing learning materials” (Peter Douglas, 2008)
Their study, which have been reported in their review, focuses on the business case for sharing e-learning materials, sustainability and levels of openness. The study reports that many projects that started in or around 2002 had very similar aims to the current OER programme but ultimately haven’t been very successful. Understandably it has been difficult to learn why these initiatives failed as institutions are unwilling to publicise their lack of success. Traditionally institutional business models and IPR policies are developed by enterprise/knowledge transfer departments, which are often driven by rather more commercial ideology than academic departments. However it appear that many institutions are currently in the process of transitioning these business models. The impact of this transition remains to be seen.
In their last sesion (apart from section 3.5 Major Challenges and 4.0 OER- Calls for
research, actions and the future) OpenLearn has had considerable impact on the Open
University, this is measurable in terms of bringing students into the institution. An
estimated 7000 registrations are a direct result of OpenLearn and it is 5th on the list of reasons why people come to the OU. OpenLearn is aimed at primarily at learners rather than other educators, content is the attractor, but the push is for education.
The OU has also set up a range of low-level partnerships based on OpenLearn, this was
not a predicted outcome of the project, it’s a whole new approach to collaboration.
Initially the OU found it was surprisingly hard to convince people that Openlearn
materials were actually free and somewhat surprisingly there has been little demand for OpenLearn content from the JISC RePRODUCE projects. OER is about giving
permission in advance for things that otherwise have to be negotiated and therefore might never happen. It’s about “you act openly, we act openly, let’s collaborate”. However things take time, open collaboration really scales up the time element, it’s impossible to realistically measure impact over a one year period in any sensible way. (Patrick McAndrew, Open University)

Conclusions
They believe that the OER movement is making real progress worldwide, and
opportunistic, the money just happens to be available right now. They pointed out that higher education institutions business models have changed significantly in recent years as a result of the information explosion. Institutions are no longer the sole repositories of information and knowledge. Information is now ubiquitously availably through multiple channels, not least the Internet. However there is a difference between accessing information and developing learning and understanding and this is where higher education institutions still have a key role to play.
References:
Li Yuan; Sheila MacNeill; Wilbert Kraan (2008), Open Educational Resources
Opportunities and Challenges for Higher Education.
http://openeducationnews.org/2008/12/02/summaries-of-oers-presentations-at-cetis08/
http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/images/0/0b/OER_Briefing_Paper.pdf

Atkins, D, E.; Brown, J, S. and Hammond, A, L. (2007), A Review of the Open
Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges and New
Opportunities,
http://tinyurl.com/2swqsg

Downes, S. (2006) Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources, National
Research Council Canada,
www.oecd.org/document/32/0,2340,en_2649_33723_36224352_1_1_1_1,00.html.

Geser, G (2007), Open Educational Practices and Resources - OLCOS Roadmap 2012,
http://www.olcos.org/cms/upload/docs/olcos_roadmap.pdf

Helen Beetham , Rhona Sharpe, Andrew Ravenscroft and John Cook (2007) ,
‘Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age , Routledge , London and New York : 207 -217

MIT OpenCourseWare (2006), 2005 Program Evaluation Findings Report,
http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/global/05_Prog_Eval_Report_Final.pdf
OECD (2007), Giving Knowledge for Free: the Emergence of Open Educational
Resources,
http://tinyurl.com/62hjx6.

UNESCO (2005), Open Content for Higher Education,
http://www.unesco.org/iiep/virtualuniversity/media/forum/oer_forum_session_2_note.pdf

Wiley, D. (2006a) The Current State of Open Educational Resources,
www.oecd.org/document/32/0,2340,en_2649_33723_36224352_1_1_1_1,00.html.

Wiley, D. (2006b) On the Sustainability of Open Educational Resource Initiatives in
Higher Education,
www.oecd.org/edu/oer.
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/33/9/38645447.pdf