Open educational resources

OER-Logo

Open educational resources (OER) are an Internet empowered worldwide community effort to create an education commons.

The term "open educational resources" was first adopted at UNESCO's 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Open educational resources are educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses to re-mix, improve and redistribute. Open educational resources include:

• Learning content: full courses, course materials, content modules, learning objects, collections, and journals.
• Tools: Software to support the creation, delivery, use and improvement of open learning content including searching and organization of content, content and learning management systems, content development tools, and on-line learning communities.
• Implementation resources: Intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design-principles, and localization of content.

In June 2007, educators at the iCommons iSummit in Dubrovnik joined the open movement worldwide to showcase emerging open education initiatives and to explore ways to better create, share and evolve open educational materials.

In September 2006, the Third Annual Open Education Conference (Community, Culture and Content) was held in Logan, Utah. The last conference was held on September 24-27, 2007 in Logan, Utah.

From 24 October to 2 December 2005 the UNESCO on-line Forum Open course content for higher education took place.

OER and Open Source

The past 2 years have been marked by a strong increase in the Open Educational Resource (OER) movement and in Open Educational Licenses (like the Creative Commons one). Many of the projects on OER were funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and partly also by the Shuttleworth Foundation that focuses on projects concerning collaborative content creation.

There has been a strong international debate on how to apply OER in practice and the UNESCO chaired a vivid discussion on this through its International Institute of Educational Planning (IIEP).

By the second half of 2006 it also became clear to some of the forerunners that OER and Free / Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) do somehow belong together. As a result the discussion groups of IIEP on OER and FLOSS were merged and forces were further joined through mergers with a related OECD campaign.

What still has not become clear by now to most actors in the OER domain is that there are further links between the OER and the Free / Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) movements, beyond the principles of “FREE” and “OPEN”. The FLOSS model stands for more than this and, like e.g. Wikipedia, shows how users can become active “resource” creators and how those resources can be re-used and freely maintained. In OER on the other hand a focus is still on the traditional way of resource creation and role distributions.

FLOSS communities are today known for producing good quality software using a different development approach than proprietary software producer. FLOSS is built by a community of volunteers and might be backed by companies that generate their revenues by providing services related to the software. In more recent years FLOSS communities also gained attention for their community production and support models and regarding their way of knowledge creation and learning. FLOSS communities possess many characteristics that educational settings seek to apply such as:

1. Open and inclusive ethos: everyone can participate, no charges, no deadlines, life long participation
2. Up to date content; everyone can add, edit and update the content
3. Materials are usually the product of many authors with many contributions from people other than authors
4. Frequent releases and updates where product features and community structures are the result of a continuous re-negotiation / reflection process within a continuous development cycle
5. Prior learning outcomes and processes are systematically available through mailing lists, forums, commented code and further instructional materials (re-use)
6. A large support network; provided voluntarily by the community member in a collaborative manner nearly 24/7
7. Free Riders (lurker) welcome paradox – the more the better
8. New ICT solutions are adapted early by the community

Educational settings might be partly aware that FLOSS-like principles can benefit education, but there has been no structured and systematically approach on mapping and transferring them, or to develop new educational models and scenarios around them. The European Union funded FLOSSCom project is likely to be the first attempt to map the open source landscape from an educational point of view, but further research and work still remains to be done.

See also

• Educational Technology Magazine article: Towards a Global Learning Commons: ccLearn. By Ahrash Bissell and Jamie Boyle.
• Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's OER study
• OER Grapevine - a wiki and email list bringing OER project leaders together to brainstorm on OER development issues and strategies
• Open Educational Resources and Practices - a slide show with audio and article that explores open educational resources and practices in a tertiary educational institution.
• OER Commons - a teaching and learning network that allows users to add context to OER across collections.
• The FLOSSCom Project on possible new educational approaches combining OER and FLOSS-like principles
• SelfThe SELF Platform - funded by the European Union - aims to be the central platform with high quality educational and training materials about Free Software and Open Standards.
• Open-Of-Course - a multilingual and interactive portal for open content courses and tutorials.
• Open Educational Practices and Resources: OLCOS Roadmap 2012. Open eLearning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS) Ed.: Geser, Guntram (2007).
• OER Tutorials A collaborative development with the OLCOS project consortium to support the creation, re-use and sharing of OER material.
• Wired Wired news article about OER