22.1 Can oer really impact higher education and human development  (Page 11/13)

In looking at some of the resources I found thus far, I’m feeling an eerie sense of deja vu: haven’t there been openly available content resources before in print form? At the same time, it seems that OER collections are often unvetted for quality. For example, I clicked on the Wikieducator link and started exploring. I ended up looking at some science exercises created for elementary school biology students by students at Saint Michael’s College. The exercises were interesting and well-structured in many ways, but they also indicated that these OERs were of variable and sometimes untested quality.

Finally, it would help if OERs included a ‘chain of custody’ of sorts, by which I mean a way to trace the resources back to their creators. For instance, I’ve tried to trace the Saint Michael’s College OERs back to the source to see if I could learn more about them. The link on the Wikieducator site led back to the college web site, but the college’s search engine turned up nothing on the resources themselves. There is a professor teaching a course with that in the title; perhaps I could contact him and find out whether or not there is a connection there. But the connection should be more transparent and traceable than that.

16. ken udas - february 19th, 2008 at 9:01 am

Once again, I am sorry for the delayed response. Jsener, I think that many of your observations and points are pretty accurate (and shared). The OER/FLOSS/FOSS/OSS/Open Education/etc. “community” does seem to function as a rather loosely related collective. One has suggested that OSS projects develop because an individual or organization has a need that can be met with the development of some software (they have an itch to scratch) and they decided to pursue development and/or distribution using an OSS licensing model, frequently for rather pragmatic reasons. When they make this decision, no matter the reason, they are committing to a certain level of access.

I think that the “magnetic north” might be similar for OER. What if we just suggest that for starters we are agreeing that more access is better than less access. So when we decide to create and or use OER we try to do it in such a way that it enhances access. If we keep this in mind we will consciously do things like using licensing that supports the widest opportunities for distribution, using file formats that do not require proprietary software clients to read and edit the files, store content in places that are readily searched and are open to all, etc. These examples point to a few realities that reduced access (licensing, economics, and physical access) – there are of course others.

As a side note, the existence of WikiEducator, OCWC, Connexions, OER Commons, EduCommons, etc. point to the fact that a lot of work is being done around access, and that events like the COSL sponsored OpenEd meeting point to a growing community of practitioners.

Access does not address all of the issues that jsener has raised, but it is a start. It at least allows us to think operationally about the many decisions that must be made. It helps us to slowly and incrementally move North. We might then say, not only should our OER be accessible, but they should also be Usable. We might then start asking ourselves why would folks want to use and reuse our OER? If we assume that they will actually be used for teaching and learning purposes, we might want to start making decisions that relate to “quality,” ease of customization, etc. For many applications being able to track the work back to the original authors (and contributing authors) will enhance the “usefulness” for teachers that might have questions about the content that are not obvious.