Coughlan, Tony and Perryman, Leigh-Anne (2011). Something for everyone? The different approaches of academic disciplines to Open Educational Resources and the effect on widening participation. Journal of Open, Flexible and Distance Learning, 15(2), pp. 11–27. (original) (raw)
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Benefits and challenges of OER for higher education institutions
2010
1. Executive summary The emergence of teaching materials and processes as open educational resources (OER) in higher education in the 21st century is part of the much larger social movement towards 'opening up'what was previously 'closed'to all except a limited number of people who paid for access to or use of information and services. Initially OER was understood as sharing specific 'products', but it now thought of as including the underlying pedagogical 'practices'.
Exploring the Business Case for Open Educational Resources
2012
The Open Educational Resource (OER) movement, which began at the turn of the millennium, was motivated by the ideal that knowledge is the common wealth of humankind and should be freely shared. Most institutions that decided to implement the ideal by creating OER relied on donor funding, notably from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which has demonstrated an admirable combination of consistency and exibility in funding the OER movement around the world. As the OER movement took o , however, questions about its sustainability became increasingly pressing because it could not continue to rely inde nitely on donor funding. Institutions and governments began to review the economics of OER in order to determine whether there was a business case for investing in their production and use. It is against this background that I am delighted to welcome this preliminary version of an essay by Neil Butcher and Sarah Hoosen on The Business Case for Open Educational Resources. It was comm...
Five critiques of the open educational resources movement
Teaching in Higher Education, 2013
This paper will review existing literature on Open Educational Resources. It is intended to examine and critique the theories which underpin the promotion of OER in higher education, not provide guidance on their implementation. 1.) I will introduce the concepts of positive and negative liberty to suggest an undertheorisation of the term 'open'. 2.) OER literature will be shown to endorse a two-tiered system, in which the institution is both maintained and disaggregated. 3.) I will highlight a diminishing of the role of pedagogy within the OER vision, and the promotion of a learner-centred model for education. 4.) This stance will be aligned with humanistic assumptions of unproblematic self-direction and autonomy. 5.) I will discuss the extent to which the OER movement aligns itself with economically-orientated models of the university. I offer these critiques as a framework for the OER movement to develop as a theoretically rigorous area of scholarship.
The Organisational Impact of Open Educational Resources
The open educational resource (OER) movement has been growing rapidly since 2001, stimulated by funding from benefactors such as the Hewlett Foundation and UNESCO, and providing educational content freely to institutions and learners across the World. Individuals and organisations are motivated by a variety of drivers to produce OERs, both altruistic and self-interested. There are parallels with the open source movement where authors and others combine their efforts to provide a product which they and others can use freely and adapt to their own purposes. There are many different ways in which OER initiatives are organised and an infinite range of possibilities for how the OERs themselves are constituted. If institutions are to develop sustainable OER initiatives they need to build successful change management initiatives, developing models for the production and quality assurance of OERs, licensing them through appropriate mechanisms such as the Creative Commons, and considering how the resources will be discovered and used by learners.
EADTU 25th Conference Proceedings, 2012
At present, a major educational wave is emerging, which promotes the use of Open Educational Resources (henceforth: OER) and fosters an Open Education culture based on the idea of education as a public and common good. OER refers to "the open provision of educational resources, enabled by ICT, for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users” (UNESCO, 2002). Those "resources" comprise the creation of contents and courses, inasmuch as open source software, standards and licensing tools. OER can be under a copyright license that allow their distribution by clearly specifying which rights are reserved to the author (e.g. Creative Commons, Copyleft licenses) or under a free content license which has no significant legal restriction on people's freedom (e.g. Copyfree or Public Domain Licenses).
Reflections on sustaining Open Educational Resources: an institutional case study
This paper reviews some of the literature on the sustainability of Open Educational Resources (OER) and what it has to say about successful or sustainable open content projects on the internet. It goes on to argue that OER need to be considered with respect to the different types of economy � market, public and social � that operate for educational materials in particular and education in general. The paper then examines what sustainability means to different actors in these economies and the relationships between them, notably within organisations, between organisations and amongst communities and individuals, but not within or with political institutions. This is followed by a case study of one project within one higher educational organization: OpenLearn at The Open University in the UK. The case study outlines the objectives of the OpenLearn project; notes its relationship to The Open University�s mission; lists the major internal and external benefits that have arisen from the ...