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OER - Open Educational Resources

By jtcobb on Sep 20, 2007 in Open Education

The Open Educational Resource movement has yet to gain the level of notice it deserves, in my opinion. A new initiative launched by Creative Commons may be one of many signs that the situation is changing.

Note: This is a post that I update on a regular basis. If you are interested in open education, I encourage you to bookmark this post on Del.icio.us and check back often.

Open Educational Resources
A brief appeal to any readers who write blogs related to online learning, open source business models, or the general collaborative possibilities of the Web: Once you have read the following, consider posting something on open educational resources. This is a phenomenon that, in my experience, has still not captured the broader awareness it deserves.

If I am reaching my target demographic, then I suspect some readers of Mission to Learn are quite familiar with the term “Open Educational Resources.” If I am reaching my target demographic, then I suspect many others are not. I hope today’s post will have at least some value for each group.

The catalyst for this particular post is the recent launch by Creative Commons of ccLearn, a division of Creative Commons, “dedicated to realizing the full potential of the Internet to support open learning and open educational resources.”

Open Educational Resources, or OER, as the Wikipedia entry will tell you in more detail, is a term that came out of UNESCO’s 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. It is intended to denote “educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses re-mix, improve and redistribute.”

My sense is that this is a term and a movement much more visible in the international development and non-governmental organization (NGO) community than in the domestic United States nonprofit community. Perhaps the most visible manifestation of it here in recent years is the MIT Open Courseware Initiative.

As the involvement of MIT might suggest, OER tends to be associated more with the academic sector than with the association, charitable organization, or corporate sector. The availability and inclination of academic subject matter experts to participate in a movement of this sort is perhaps a driving reason for the academic stronghold in the movement, but certainly portions of the work being done by technical and management support organizations like Tech Soup (see TechSoup, Learning, and Web 2.0) fit under the OER umbrella, and groups like LINGOs are primed for making a more meaningful contribution to it than they appear to have done to date.

A handful of sites you will want to visit if you take time to find out more about OER:

Sources for Open Education:
If you would an organized snapshot of the wide range of podcasts available at the University sites below, I recommend openculture’s Free Online Courses from Great Universities.

Reports and Guides:

FlossCom.Net, which is building its efforts on the open source Ubuntu operating system, also offers a nice brief introduction via SlideShare

Blogs: There are quite a few blogs out there that are either dedicated to OER or discuss it with some frequency. The best single source I know of for finding OER blogs is:

OER Blogs

Also, see Open Education News, launched in June 2008.

There is still much to be done to raise awareness and implement standards across the OER movement, but the ccLearn project represents one more significant step forward in improving access to OER materials and information. For nonprofits on tight budgets that are seeking educational resources, this may be another instance of the Web windfall at work. For associations, many of which tend to be, in my opinion, overly and unnecessarily proprietary about their intellectual property, the process by which the movement has developed and continues to develop is worth observing. For corporations, OER may represent a highly productive way to engage in the global community.

I won’t pretend that this is in any way a comprehensive overview of OER. If there are organizations I have not listed above that you feel deserve mention or if you have observed or experienced the pros or cons of OER first hand, please comment.

JTC

P.S. - If you enjoy what you read here on Mission to Learn, I encourage you to subscribe to the feed. And if you like this particular post, I encourage you to Save This Page to Del.icio.us.

Postscript, 24-Sept-07: Based on an e-mail related to the to the original posting, I have added OER Commons to the list of sites above. The Institute for the Study of Knowledge

Management in Education (ISKME), the group behind OER Commons was recently named a 2007 Awards Laureate by The Tech Museum of Innovation. Additionally, based on the comment below from Jennifer Maddrell, I’d like to highlight the Introduction to Open Education Course currently under way with Professor David Wiley at Utah State University. As Jennifer notes, this syllabus represents a great addition to the list above. (And many thanks to Stephen Downes for posting the link that led Jennifer here.) Finally, many thanks to Andreas Meiszner from FLOSSCom (whose site is listed above) for his comments. Based on these, I have added the OpenLearn project to the list above, and I recommend the presentation Andreas references.

Related posts:

  1. 5 Great Open Education Highlights
  2. 300+ Learning Videos at Open U. YouTube Channel
  3. Can Open Education Work for Associations? (Part I)
  4. The Tragedy of Open Education? A Look at a New Blog
  5. Open Education News Launches

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  1. Andreas Meiszner | Sep 20, 2007 | Reply

    Hello Jeff

    Let me just pick up on a couple of your points and also explain a bit more what we at the FLOSSCom project aim to do.

    The open educational resource movement is indeed about sharingcontent and to allow others to use it and edit it. As you point out this is currently most visible at the higher education sector, though the K12 school education sector – at least the European one – has also a strong stand. Somehow they seem to have less problems of sharing.

    The OER movement was partly inspired by the open source software movement where you give software away for free and allow others to use and improve it (this is the open side). As we have seen this model works out well from a business perspective and from the quality perspective. What we further can see at open source is the benefit of “collaborative production”. Taking Wikipedia we see that this principle also works on the content side (I know that there are quality concerns, but I also know how many bad lectures I listened to at my university time – so everything is relative).

    With OER we are – by now – still at an early stage as we make the content “free” available and “open” to be modified, remixed and improved. The second part however, the modification, remix and improvement, as we see it in open source or at Wikipedia still does not take that much place. There are several large scale projects today that aim to foster exactly this second aspect. The OpenLearn project (http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/home.php) in example not only provides open educational resources, but also features a learning environment where people can engage with the content. The project is still fairly young and constantly improving by closely monitoring users’ feedback.

    Our FLOSSCom project enters somewhere here. We believe that education can learn a lesson from open source communities on collaborative content development and the establishment of learning communities. I am not talking about the use of open source software in education, but the use of the principles of open source communities for education. The open source case also shows that “content” is more than only some “courses” or instructional materials and that content is not “static”. It also provides some insights on who develops content for which purpose and how.

    A presentation that might provide an idea of what I am talking about is available at: http://www.slideshare.net/andreasmeiszner/learning-resources-in-floss

    Thank you also for featuring our presentation about the “Learning the open source way” project and our current summer university. Here we exactly try to get in open source members (like the Ubuntu community) and to bring them together with educators to identify principles that have a potential to improve education. The project is open to every one interested and we are keen to learn from / with you!

    If you like to leran more about these topics chack also out the FLOSSCom website that (I think I can say this) provides a good picture on the subjects and covers a broad field. There are also several links to other ongoing OER projects, academic research and so on.

    Best
    Andreas

  2. Jennifer Maddrell | Sep 24, 2007 | Reply

    I read your post from a link from Stephen Downes and wanted to add a link to an Introducation to Open Education course being facilitated by Professor David Wiley at Utah State University - see http://opencontent.org/wiki/index.php?title=Intro_Open_Ed_Syllabus

    Dozens of participants from around the world are reading the course material (good additions to your list above) and preparing weekly blog reflections. For anyone interested in the open education “movement”, this course site is also a great place to start.

  3. Dalia | Sep 23, 2008 | Reply

    Nowadays thanks to Internet there are many useful OER to learn whatever we are interested in.
    I just finished my studies but I know I have still so much to learn… so I’m doing some business courses online and I also practice my language knowledges in a web site I found recently babelyou!

  4. jtcobb | Oct 6, 2008 | Reply

    Dalia - Thanks for stopping by to comment + mentioning babelyou. I will add it to my list of language learning resources. - Jeff

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