OERs - The Key Issues

OERs – the issues

Defining OERs

I’ll use the Wikieducator definition, cited by Cornier (2009):

“The term ‘Open Educational Resource(s)’ (OER) refers to educational resources (lesson plans, quizzes, syllabi, instructional modules, simulations, etc.) that are freely available for use, reuse, adaptation, and sharing…”

What are OERs trying to achieve? What problems are they solving for?

In my view,

·      OERs are trying to increase access to education to people who don’t currently have access or have restricted access.

·      OERs are trying to give learners access to the best quality educational resources appropriate to their needs.

In thinking about the key issues facing OERs, I’ve tried to think about any factors that are preventing them from providing optimal solutions to these problems.

Issues

Issue 1 – scale

·      The huge volume of OERs available (and growing) are often uncategorized and of variable quality. Cornier (2009) writes that learners will find themselves ‘wading in a sea of content.’ Learners need to have a means of identifying appropriate resources of sufficient quality if OERs are to have any use to them.

·      Some repositories have been created to address this issue (e.g. MERLOT), although it can still be difficult to find appropriate materials on these.

·      We can predict an increasing role for curators and collators of OERs – perhaps textbooks will shift from the current rigid, hard-copy format to more fluid, online formats curated by experts.

·      Such collations could be dynamic – allowing learners to annotate their own copies and share annotations with other learners, or to add contextualized content (e.g. a current YouTube video that illustrates a particular piece of learning, or a blog post).

Issue 2 – context and suitability of OERs to different learning situations

·      ‘Knowledge’ and ‘content’ are different (Cornier, 2009) – ‘content’ is a presentation of knowledge that has typically been contextualized in some way to suit a particular learning audience, learning at a particular level. Learners in a particular context may find little benefit in accessing an OER crafted in a different context (Hatakka, 2009).

·      One response to this has been to suggest that OERs should be made more granular, so that it is easier for them to be incorporated into a variety of contexts (Hatakka, 2009).

·      Such granular resources may have lower inherent pedagogic value, requiring an intermediary (e.g. a teacher) to be more involved in rendering the OER useful for learning. Wiley (2004) has written about the ‘Reusability’ paradox, where the higher the inherent pedagogical value of an OER (which usually means the more contextualized it is), the less reusable it is in a different context.

Issue 3 – there isn’t a robust model for the ‘OER economy’ yet

·      BOERs may seem like an abundant resource – in that once they have been produced and digitized (often with funding from foundations or public funds), the marginal cost of distributing them digitally is minimal.

·      I would argue that they are not an abundant resource, however – Hatakka (2009) has written about the high development costs of new OER content, and Downes (2007) writes that the UK’s Open University spends an average of US$3m per course on content development. In most fields of knowledge, OERs will require updating and maintaining, which will be an ongoing cost (Hylen & Schuller, 2007). OERs are scarce resources.

·      So for OERs to be sustainable, I’d argue that we need a mechanism to efficiently allocate resources to their creation, maintenance and distribution.

·      In a market economy, we would let the interaction of supply and demand determine ‘value’ and the optimum allocation of resources. The things people want to learn will change over time, and the ‘OER economy’ needs to be able to respond to these shifting priorities.

·      The current ‘OER economic model’ is distorted in that, it seems to me, a lot of it focuses on ‘supply-push’ economics, with limited means to capture demand accurately. For example, universities like MIT have published learning materials from their existing courses in online format. By offering these for free as OERs, there is no part of the system that accurately measures demand for specific learning needs from learners.  ‘Supply-push’ systems tend to be inefficient, producing unwanted products that are insufficiently tailored to the needs of consumers. There are no incentives for the producers of OERs to work at modifying them to suit the needs of different learners.

·      I’m not arguing that learners need to pay for OERs – that would defeat the purpose of making them open. There are many different possible funding models that could keep OERs free to the learner – for example, (Downes (2007) lists the Endowment Model, the Membership Model, the Donations Model, the Conversion Model, the Contributor-Pay Model, the Sponsorship Model, the Institutional Model and the Governmental Model).

·      I’m simply arguing that, whichever funding model is chosen, there still needs to be an underlying mechanism that measures demand (e.g. automatically-collated data showing the number of downloads for an OER, or rating systems from users akin to Amazon’s book rating system). Some of this is already in progress through learning analytics systems.

·      Note that there is an underlying assumption in some of the writing about OER funding that assumes that the traditional university model of ‘academics as the producers of knowledge’ and ‘students as the consumers of knowledge’ applies. I’d argue that what we need to move towards is a ‘co-producer’ model, where there is less of a divide between academics and students – all people involved in learning should produce, modify and adapt OERs. Downes (2007, p.38) cites a contributor to a recent UNESCO conference arguing for ‘a shift from a provider/user model to a community model of collaborative development’.

·      Such an approach, I would argue, will still be more sustainable if there is some underlying mechanism for the recognition of the economic value of an OER. Exploring such mechanisms is not the focus of this blog post, and there are other factors to consider around copyright and licensing – for the immediate purposes of this post I am simply trying to suggest the possibility of making a learner’s demand for a specific OER more measurable and transparent, as I think this would lead to higher-quality OERs that learners would find more useful.

Conclusion

OERs are attempting to increase people’s access to educational resources of appropriate quality. In my view, this goal is being impeded by issues of scale, contextualisation and the fact that the over-arching economic model for OERs is not robust. Learners need to have the means to identify and signal their demand for the OERs they deem most relevant, useful and valuable.

References

Cornier, D. (2009). ‘OERs – shining light, new textbook model, or harbinger of a new imperialism?’, blog post available at  http://davecormier.com/edblog/2009/02/22/oers-shining-light-new-textbook-model-or-harbinger-of-a-new-imperialism/ (accessed 24 April 2013).

Downes, Stephen (2007). ‘Models for sustainable open educational resources’, Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects, vol. 3. Available at: http://ijklo.org/Volume3/IJKLOv3p029-044Downes.pdf (accessed 28 March 2013).

Hatakka, M. (2009). ‘Build it and they will come? – Inhibiting factors for reuse of open content in developing countries’, in EJISDC – the Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries, Vol. 37, n.5, pp. 1-16. Available at: http://www.ejisdc.org/ojs2/index.php/ejisdc/article/view/545/279 (accessed 27 March 2013).

Hylen, J. & Schuller, T. (2007). Giving knowledge for free. OECD Observer, 263. Available at: http://www.oecd.org/document41/0,3343,en_2649_35845581_38659497_1_1_1_1,00.html (accessed 28 March 2013).

Wiley, D. (2004). ‘The Reusability Paradox’, Connexions [online], http://cnx.org/content/m11898/1.18/ (accessed 3 April 2013).