22.1 Can oer really impact higher education and human development

Open Educational Resources (OER) are rapidly growing and taking shape. What might it mean for higher education? The movement holds promise for opening up access and improving the quality of higher education around the world. It could even create new types of universities.

But, haven’t we heard this before?

In the early to mid 90’s, online learning held similar promise. Early adopters of online learning also focused on access and quality. The web enabled exciting new ways to design and deliver student-centered learning; it enabled the convenience of anytime-anywhere education.

Yet, when you look at online learning’s impact, at least in the U.S., it has not delivered on the promise of increased access (for quality it has faired better). Nor is online learning the disruptive innovation it was hyped to be in the 1990’s. OER shares some of the characteristics of online learning. We can look to online learning as a guidepost to OER.

Can oer live up to its promise?

Viewed as content alone, it is likely that OER will become another incremental innovation: it is an extension of existing higher education activities; it provides more options for learning and it expands reach to include those not typically served by the institution. In this way, it expands access – access to resources. But resources are only part of what is needed.

OER promises cost-reducing efficiencies. Using OER to produce teaching materials lowers costs of creation and distribution. Low-cost or free textbooks, video lectures, handouts, etc. are important for increasing access to resources around the world. New systems could be built on these efficiencies that could make education less expensive, while still being local and personal. Low-cost models have been implemented using online learning. For example, you can now earn a U.S. regionally-accredited master degree online for $4,900 .

At least one concept for a new university has been discussed that is based on the efficiencies of OER content. For example, Jim Fay, California State University, and Jan Sjogren, Argosy University, proposed an open source online degree-granting institution at the Fall 2007 MIT-LINC meeting. Their Open Source Online University is modeled after a traditional university in structure and functions. It uses the innovation of OER to lower costs and increase scalability by creating a new publishing mechanism for faculty while it creates a global online open curriculum, with many variations, to be openly shared around the world.

OER are also communities. From this point of view, OER may be able to have a bigger impact on access, equity and quality because it is imbedded in a network of people and organizations that collaborate and share similar goals. Wikieducator is a good example of OER as community. Recently celebrating 2,500 users and 100,000 edits, Wikieducator has the makings of the kind of “digital university” described by John Seeley Brown and Paul Duguid in their landmark paper from 1995. It is more likely that new solutions for access will come out of these kinds of community models.