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Taylor’s “Open Courseware University” is a spin on the longstanding model of separating instruction from evaluation. Students in many countries can already prepare for credit-bearing examinations from the University of London External Programme and the like by learning the material at third party tutorial colleges. OERs could fit into such a system in many ways, such as through a consortium of tutorial colleges who would like to lower the costs of curriculum development through that sort of cooperation.
The issue that raises is that of the role of the private sector. Much of the growth of open source software has come from private companies that release their software openly to build a user base and to get attention, with a revenue model of selling ancillary services such as technical support and customization. Similarly, there’s room for proprietary institutions of higher education to develop OERs, especially institutions that understand the difference between instruction and evaluation and have a revenue model based primarily on the latter.
What we’re doing with the Web is a signal that Open Source is significant. We do need to beware of ‘rapture of the technology,’ however, and the other features of technology that have led to so many frustrations in past decades.
I wrote about some of those self-defeating features a few years ago, and made some suggestions about how to get past those barriers.
Most of these barriers, and strategies, are just as relevant to this generation of technology as they were to the previous ones.
Recognition of Prior Learning and Assessment of Prior Learning are increasingly common services in Australia and New Zealand. RPL is generally known as a process that simply recognises the prior educational achievements of the candidate and aligns them with the assessment process being applied. APL is more along the lines of what you call for I think. It is more like an interview process where a trained assessor will assist the candidate to express what they know so as to meet the assessment criteria. APL is not as common as RPL in Aust and NZ, and many institutions implement the services very poorly, often resulting in the candidate electing to simply do the course to avoid the strain in the RPL or APL process!
I agree though, that it could be through these processes that an education through OER could be obtained. Institutions already working in OER have a head start, because they are familiar with their own OER. Assessing the learning done through another institution’s OER would be more difficult however.
I also agree that “competency standards” potentially gives OER currency in the assessment process. If an international initiative to develop AND maintain competency standards was established, then OER developers could look to them as assessment guides, learning objectives, content structure, even a base level curriculum… but establishing an internationally agreed set of competency standards AND maintaining them into the future is a pretty hefty thing.
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