What are Open Educational Resources?
The term OER (Open Educational Resources) was first coined in the summer of 2002 at the UNESCO forum on the impact of open courseware for higher education in developing countries. OERs have received significant support from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (www.hewlett.org), which has sponsored organizations such as MIT in the USA, the U.K. Open University and the Virtual University for the Small States of the Commonwealth.
OERs are digitised learning materials that are offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and re-use for teaching, learning and research. OERs include:
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Learning Content: Full courses, courseware, content modules, learning objects, collections and journals. Many of these resources can be found through COL's index of free learning content at www.colfinder.org/ocw
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Tools: Software to support the development, use, re-use and delivery of learning content including searching and organisation of content, content and learning management systems, content development tools and on-line learning communities.
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Implementation Resources: Intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design principles of best practice, and localisation of content. COL uses and encourages institutions to use the Creative Commons BY-SA-2.5 license; more information on the license is available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5
Computers, bandwidth, tools and implementation resources are critical to this development because they allow open content to be accessed and used. For example, teachers have to be able to search for potentially useful resources, and these resources need to be in formats that enable them to be adapted and reused. The Creative Commons license mentioned above makes resources legally available for adaptation and reuse.
COL also supports online communities through WikiEducator and professional discussion forums linked to these communities. Educators in Commonwealth countries can use WikiEducator just like VUSSC members are doing www.wikieducator.org for more information.
OERs are typically stored in databases, or repositories. Each institution that creates OERs usually also stores their materials in their own database, sometimes called a "learning object repository". Making OERs accessible to indexing engines like the COL Knowledge Finder, mentioned above is critical to enabling educators to quickly find and download resources.
Why are OERs so important?
There are many benefits arising from creating, using and adapting OERs. For example, there is increased collegiality and online cooperation among educators who share in the development of learning resources and increased quality as learning materials move out of the private classroom into the public domain. More importantly from COL's point of view is the potential of OERs to provide knowledge and learning resources that would otherwise remain inaccessible.
OERs also offer developing countries a level playing field for collaborating in the creation of learning material. Educators in industrialised countries have few advantages over those in developing countries when they collaborate online. Materials can be infinitely customised, providing the appropriate free content license is used. The OER movement thus enables developing countries to lead developments and contribute to the global knowledge community as active partners and not passive consumers of others' "knowledge". In other words, this development has the potential to empower educators in the smallest countries and democratise the creation knowledge itself.
The progress of OERs
Mainstream OERs were made visible when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the USA announced that it would release its class notes for anyone to use. These are not full courses, but rather quality classroom resources.
The second phase is being characterised by organisations like the U.K. Open University releasing many of its courses to the public domain. The UKOU's Open Content Initiative makes educational resources freely available on the Internet, with state-of-the-art learning support and collaboration tools to connect students and educators. These are full courses from which lifelong learners will have much to gain.
The third phase of this movement is happening where multiple countries participate in the development of materials. One example is the work of the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth (VUSSC), which sees educators from more than a dozen countries collaborating to create learning resources. The materials they produce will need to be adapted and fine-tuned for each country but that is a simple matter when the open educational resource of the basic course is truly open.
OERs are making a massive – some might say a revolutionary – contribution to ODL provision. The production of materials needs to consider their likely users – the learners and learning facilitators. The users must be able to legally use these materials (requiring the correct copyright licenses) and adapt them (requiring editable formats and the underlying digital assets – graphics, etc.). It requires that educators have access to computers and the Internet. Governments need to ensure that educators are provided with training and support, as well as cost effective bandwidth to institutions.
The Open Educational Resources movement has come a long way in recent years and holds enormous promise for increasing access to and quality of learning, particularly in developing countries.
--Karen Speirs
