Open all OERs

Time to reflect on the Commonwealth of Learning (CoL) workshop on Open Educational Resources, which was held in Windhoek, Namibia this week. Around 50 delegates attended, predominantly from African nations including Namibia, South Africa and Botswana and there were also representatives from Canada, Australia, Holland, Trinidad and Tobago, Malaysia and Jamaica. Many were representing the Quality Assurance Agencies of their home countries. Dr Stella Anthony (Australian Universities Network for Quality Assurance) gave the opening presentation for the event, and spoke about the opportunities and challenges of OERs in higher education. She took a pragmatic approach, arguing that we need to pay attention to a number of issues that threaten the success of OERs, including lack of a common understanding of their purposes and limitations, overcoming infrastructural barriers, as well as ensuring the quality of OERs in terms of content and design.

Jenny Glennie (South African Institute for Distance Education) presented a paper entitled 'Understanding OER in Higher Education' in which she outlined the basics of Openness and provided essential input into what OERs are for those who were new to the concept. A presentation by Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams (University of Cape Town, South Africa) opened up the debate over the benefits and limitations of OERs, and addressed some of the quality assurance issues, as well as issues of financial sustainability and battles over ownership of content. IPR and Creative Commons were discussed.

I was live-blogging throughout these presentations, and during the first panel session presented two questions from the Twitter stream to the panel. The first question was from Mark Power (Bolton University, UK) who wondered why we should pay attention to OERs when reusable learning objects had apparently failed. The panel responded that OERs are not the same as RLOs, for one simple reason - Learning objects are usually decontextualised (stand alone) whereas OERs are generally contextualised within a larger module or course/programme. It is all a matter of granularity, with Open Courseware the most contextualised. The second question was asked about design and content. If content is good, but poorly presented in an amatuerish manner, does this matter? The panel agreed that it did matter, but that many OERs are generally well presented anyway.

After lunch, it was my turn to present my invited paper, which dealt with the wider issues surrounding OERs, such as pedagogy, theoretical and philosophical considerations. I outlined two projects, OPAL and CONCEDE which respectively examine Open Educational Practices and user generated content. I touched on the synergy between Web 2.0 tools and OERs which both espouse openness, and concluded with some ideas about how OERs could benefit higher education in the future. The following panel session was lively, with plenty of questions from the delegates. From the workshop came ideas that included the belief that OERs will improve social inclusion and encourage better student engagement, even to the point where students will contribute to the development of OER content alongside their tutors.

Sir John Daniel (our host and CEO of CoL) summed up the workshop in his closing remarks. He argued that OERs are just another development in the ongoing evolution of education, and should be treated just like any other educational process - they should not treated as a special case, and just because they are created in an open manner and are free, this doesn't mean they are poor quality. OERs, he said, go beyond centralised repositories of learning objects - their ability to be embedded across multiple web sites will mean better longevity and sustainability. OERs will also encourage more widespread repurposing of existing resources across wider groups and communities of practice, he predicted. He concluded with a reference to Apple's new toy, suggesting that the iPad will do to educational resources what the iPod did to popular music.

Learning with 'e's by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.