oer
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25 years of EdTech: 2013 – Open Textbooks
[Continuing the 25 Years of Ed Tech series] If MOOCs were the glamorous side of open education, all breathless headlines and predictions, open textbooks were the practical, even dowdy, application. An extension of the OER movement, and particularly pertinent in the United States and Canada, open textbooks provided openly licensed versions of bespoke written textbooks, free for the digital version. The cost of textbooks provided an initial motivation for adoption, but it is the potential of adaption that makes them interesting. Open textbooks are sometimes criticised for being an unimaginative application of the possibilities of open. But they also offer a clear example of several aspects which need to align…
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The stuff ain’t enough
UNESCO have a call out for responses to their Draft OER Recommendations. I will post something there, but when I was considering it, the recommendations touched on a bigger problem that I feel is repeatedly overlooked in OER, which is that the resources are a necessary starting point, but they are not an end point. Particularly if your goal is to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong opportunities for all”, then it is the learner support that goes around the content that is vital. And on this, the recommendations are largely silent. There is a recommendation to develop “supportive policy” but this is focused on supporting the…
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25 Years of EdTech – 2002: Open licences & OER
(As much as I love OER, this is a crap logo) This is part of the ongoing 25 Years of Ed Tech series Now that the foundations of modern ed tech had been laid with the web, CMC, elearning, wikis, etc. the more interesting developments could commence. For 2002 I’m going with Open Educational Resources (OER). In the preceding year MIT announced its OpenCourseWare initiative which marks the real initiation of the OER movement, but it was in 2002 that the first OERs were released, and people began to understand licences (MIT would adopt Creative Commons in 2004). MIT’s goal was to make all the learning materials used by their…
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A USB port for informal learning
I’ve been part of a team working on an unusual (and dare I use the word, innovative) course at the OU. It’s called ‘Making your learning count‘, and the unusual thing about it is that it doesn’t really set out to teach a particular topic. Rather it seeks to recognise the learning that people bring with them from informal means, such as OER and MOOCs. There are several challenges in this. Firstly, we can’t just formally recognise all possible OER, so we have to get students to do something to demonstrate their learning. But then secondly, having gone for this broad approach, as opposed to just accrediting a specific MOOC…
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The Open who?
I was at the Hewlett OER meeting, and then the Creative Commons summit last week in Toronto. I’ll blog about that later, but for now (and to mark the OU’s 48th birthday today), here is a short post about the Open University. I was surprised at how often during those two meetings I would say I was from the Open University, and it be the first time the person had heard of it. I don’t mean to sound arrogant, I don’t expect everyone to have heard of us, but in two meetings that are largely about open education, it was telling. The follow up conversation would then be along the…
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OER as educational heritage
There has been a pruning of A-level subjects in the UK recently, with Art history, Archeology, and Classical studies all for the chop. It’s like the Beeching Report for education. It is puzzling in many respects – everyone talks about how the workplace is becoming increasingly fragmented, diverse in terms of jobs. We are told things like 65% of today’s students will be doing jobs that don’t exist yet (which reminds me of Anchorman’s “60% of the time it works every time“), and yet we are making the education sector increasingly homogeneous. And with higher ed funding increasingly focused on STEM subjects, it is not just at secondary level that…
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The open licence gift to the future
One of those phrases that passes around on twitter is that “metadata is a love note to the future” (apparently coined by Jason Scott). A few recent news stories have made me reflect that an open licence is also a gift to future generations. In my Types of OER User piece I argued that there are groups of people who would benefit from OER who don’t know it yet, but that option may be closed off before they know OER is an option. Recently we’ve seen Elsevier attempt to patent the online peer review system. It’s unlikely to succeed because of prior art, and is regarded I think as a…
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Emerging OER research discipline
The Primordial soup of OER… One of the things I’ve become increasingly interested in is how the OER discipline emerges. Having lived through it, you get to see the field evolve. I’m not sure it counts as a field, subject, discipline, or whatever. Is it part of a new open education discipline? Is there a unifying field at all? These are general questions I have, but one I was also interested in, was what themes have emerged in research over the years? I set out to have a look at this, by examining publications in OER Knowledge Cloud from 2001. I did a content analysis of abstracts from 2007 (chosen…
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What if OER was blogging?
I work a lot in OER, and I do a lot of blogging, and I often blog about OER. But I don’t blog as OER. In this post I’m going to compare two things that are completely different – OER repositories and blogs – and so you can’t make any valid comparisons. But that’s the point of the post really, to see if there is a different way of looking at a topic. I’ve been looking at the stats for various repositories recently, both OA publishing ones, and OER ones. Thanks to David Kernohan for pointing me at JISC’s IRUS service, which provides a breakdown of publication repositories from UK…
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The role of policy in open ed
I was invited to give a talk at the Dept of Business Information and Skills for a meeting organised by ALT, on the role of policy in open education. I looked at OER policies at the institutional, regional and national level and open access policies. I argued that open policies are a good example of how policy can influence practice, and also some of the issues. But the same applies to other areas you might want to consider. The Open Flip I argued will be significant, and policy offers us a means of reallocating resources and encouraging new models, such as Open Library Humanities. Putting these slides together was a…
