Introduction to OER

http://teacher-network.in/OER/index.php/Main_Page

What is OER

The term Open Educational Resource (OER) was coined at the 2002 UNESCO Forum on Open Courseware. Subsequently, its definition has been updated to the following:

…teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions” (2012 Paris OER declaration).

Hoosen, Moore, and Butcher (2012) have provided a clearer indication of the range of possibilities under this definition:

“They are educational materials and resources that are offered freely, are openly available to anyone and, under some licences, allow others to reuse, adapt and redistribute them with few or no restrictions. OER can include lecture notes and slides, lesson plans, textbooks, handouts given to students, videos, online tutorials, podcasts, diagrams, entire courses, and any other material designed to be used in teaching and learning. Thus, the scale of OER can vary significantly. They can be as large as a textbook or as small as a single photograph. They can make up an entire course or curriculum or can be used to enhance existing textbooks” (p. 2).

Using this definition, we can see that OER can support the free sharing and expansion in availability of educational resources. This toolkit aims to enable teachers to create and re-purpose OER.

What limits OER adoption

‘’Build it and they will come?[1]’’ This perhaps captures an earlier paradigm in the OER space, with more and more materials being made available from educators and institutions, but with limited uptake from users. The causes for limited uptake could be:

1. legal - limited awareness of open licensing possibilities amongst people
2. cultural - OER availability is more in English than in other languages, thus limiting access and use, especially in countries in Asia, Africa and South America.
3. social - OER creation is largely ‘expert-driven’ with limited participation of teachers and other resource creators and hence awareness of its possibilities is limited
4. pedagogical - teaching is often restricted to ‘text books’ in many education systems and teachers are yet to look beyond the text books for sourcing materials for their teaching, this minimises any need for OER

In addition the technology ecosystem plays an important role in OER adoption. With OER being largely digital, the means of accessing OER for reuse, revision and sharing must be freely available. OER began as a digitization of textual resources and thus text format has dominated. However, the digital allows creation possibilities in multiple formats – textual, graphics, audio-visual – and the availability of software applications for creation and re-purposing becomes critical.

Secondly, in a proprietary software dominant desktop environment, where the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is limited, it becomes prohibitively expensive for most individuals and institutions, to license proprietary applications for creating resources in audio, video and other media formats, thus limiting their creation. With the dominance of text format, and the lack of appropriate software applications, users do not have the tools for accessing and re-purposing OER in multiple formats, thus affecting its creation and adoption.

However, we now have a variety of mature and high quality FOSS applications which can allow resource creators and editors to create, re-mix, revise and re-distribute OER in multiple formats. These are available on the desktop environment, on the web and on mobile phone platforms. The power of OER comes from its ‘openness’, that it can be freely re-used, revised and re-distributed. Similarly, software that is 'open' and can be freely re-used, revised and re-distributed can create a rich learning environment, by providing the tool-set for OER creation and re-purposing.