OERs: THE PROMISE AND THE PITFALLS
One of the keys to achieving international development goals such as Education for All is the development of new course content. As this requires time, money and specialised skills, many consider open educational resources (OERs) as a solution. Educators freely adapt and re-use OERs, gaining access to valuable new sources of learning materials. So goes the theory. The reality is that there are still obstacles to overcome before OERs deliver on their promise.
The term “open educational resources” is a relatively new one. First used by the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) in 2002, OERs were defined as “technology-enabled, open provision of educational resources for consultation, use and adaption by a community of users for non-commercial purposes”. The key is that the resource has to be widely accessible, and users must be able to alter or adapt it.
A growing supply of OERs – both formal and informal course materials – is available online. COL’s online search tool for OERs and open courseware offers access to thousands of OERs from several dozen institutions worldwide. MIT’s OpenCourseWare programme alone offers free lecture materials, exams and videos for 1,900 courses.
UNESCO’s OERs wiki (http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org) provides a collaborative online workspace for some 900 people in more than 100 countries. The wiki also offers access to an extensive list of resources, including UNESCO’s first openly licensed publication. Released in June 2009, Open Educational Resources: Conversations in Cyberspace brings together background papers and reports from the first three years of activities in the UNESCO OER community to document issues, ideas and innovations in the nascent movement.
COMBATING INFORMATION IMPERIALISM
One of the criticisms of OERs is around the issue of “information imperialism” – there is concern that OERs are largely created in the developed world and imposed on the developing world. Collaborative content development is considered by many to be a strategy to combat this problem.
From the beginning, the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth (VUSSC) has focussed on “South-South” collaboration. Supported by COL, VUSSC has built capacity in online content development among educators from small states of the Commonwealth. Gathering at intensive training workshops – or “boot camps” – the educators learn skills and then apply them by developing learning materials. Their collaboration continues upon their return to their home country. And they are encouraged to share their learning with colleagues, further expanding knowledge and skills in online content development.
Over the past four years, COL has hosted six intensive training workshops. The materials developed by workshop participants for VUSSC are forming a library of OERs that are freely available for use and adaptation. (See “New website, management for VUSSC” on page 2 for more details.)
Another example of OERs being created in the developing world for the developing world is the Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) consortium. Eighteen organisations, universities and teacher training institutions in Africa are collaborating on an extensive range of multilingual OERs focussed on teacher training. It’s estimated that half a million teachers are working with these OERs.
WikiEducator is also playing an important role in building capacity in online content development. Now an independent entity operating out of Otago Polytechnic’s OER Foundation in New Zealand, WikiEducator was launched by COL in May 2006. Since then, WikiEducator has facilitated training in wiki editing skills for the development of OERs for more than 3,000 people in 30 countries.
The ongoing support of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has been an important part of the success of WikiEducator, its Content4Learning training initiative and numerous other OERs projects, including COL’s current OERs for Open Schools initiative. Educators from six countries have received training and are developing open learning materials for open school students. By next year, course materials for 20 subjects will be available for free use and adaptation by open schools in the Commonwealth (see “Online Learning Resources for Open Schools” on page 6).
MIT’s OpenCourseWare project and the UK Open University’s OpenLearn site are the best known examples of open content in higher education in the industrialised world. Earlier this year, American President Barack Obama announced a proposal to commit $50 million for the development of OERs for community colleges as part of the American Graduation Initiative. The open online courses would carry a Creative Commons license and would be freely available for use and adaption.
The initial challenges of creating awareness and support for OERs are being met. A large and rapidly growing supply of OERs is becoming available. But are they being used?
OBSTACLES FOR REUSE OF OERs
It is extremely difficult to measure use of OERs due to their “open” nature; users don’t have to register, pay or even tell anyone they are reusing or adapting these learning materials. But there is growing evidence that a number of factors hinder the reuse of open content in developing countries.
Researcher Mathias Hatakka from the Swedish Business School at Orebro University identifies 11 inhibiting factors in an article published in The Electronic Journal on Information Systems in Developing Countries (EJISDC). These factors include educational restrictions, lack of infrastructure, language, relevance and quality.
Lack of sufficient technical resources is a significant obstacle in many developing countries. In countries like Bangladesh, where only 0.3 percent of people have Internet access, it’s simply not feasible to expect practices from the developed world to be adopted.
“The term ‘build it and they will come’ does not fully relate to open content,” Hatakka concludes. “Development of more content and content of higher quality is needed but just ‘building it’ will only address a small portion of the inhibiting factors that content developers experience with reuse of open content.”
While the OER movement has made a long journey in a short time, there are still many miles to go before they present a solution to global education challenges. Institutions must develop appropriate policies and train their staff about the related technical, pedagogical and legal (e.g., copyright) issues if they are to take full advantage of OERs. Adequate technological infrastructure is required. Concerns about information imperialism must be addressed. Above all, OERs must find their way to users: in addition to developing free content, educators must develop a strategy for the delivery of that content and the identification of its potential users.
www.col.org/oer
http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org
www.vussc.org
www.tessaafrica.net
www.WikiEducator.org
www.ejisdc.org
FAQs ABOUT OERs
Open educational resources (OERs) are teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse, without charge. OERs often have a Creative Commons or GNU license that state specifically how the material may be used, reused, adapted and shared.
WHAT ARE SOME EXAMPLES OF OER MATERIALS?
• Full university courses, complete with readings, videos of lectures, homework assignments, and lecture notes.
• Interactive mini-lessons and simulations about a specific topic, such as math or physics.
• Adaptations of existing open work.
• Electronic textbooks that are peer-reviewed and frequently updated.
• Elementary school and high school (K-12) lesson plans, worksheets and activities that are aligned with state standards.
WHAT CAN I DO WITH OERs?
Here are some real-life examples of people using and contribution to OERs.
• As a teacher, you could reuse and repurpose material for use in your own classroom and augment your school’s limited resources. A physics teacher could use video from an introductory physics class at MIT or use interactive simulations from University of Colorado at Boulder’s PhET project.
• You can learn about subjects that interest you, without cost and without needing to be near a school. A cross-country trucker listens to philosophy lectures from a UC Berkeley professor while he drives long stretches of highway.
• You can contribute to open math and science textbooks that will be used by students in South Africa.
From www.oercommons.org
WHAT ABOUT INCOMPATIBLE CONTENT?
Most educational content available on the Internet remains “all-rights-reserved” due to the default rules of copyright. When OERs include these materials, the openness of the OER is compromised. This issue and solutions are explored in a recent paper by ccLearn, the Creative Commons education programme titled “Otherwise Open: Managing Incompatible Content within Open Educational Resources”.
http://learn.creativecommons.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/
Otherwise_Open_report.pdf