Open educational resources

Open educational resources (OER) are learning materials that are freely available for use, remixing and redistribution.

Open educational resources

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.

OER and open source

Since 2005 there has been a marked increase in the Open Educational Resource (OER) movement and in Open Educational Licenses (like Creative Commons). 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).

Alignment with Open Source Software community

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.

Main article: FLOSS

What has still 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 participant roles.

Best practices and communities for OER contributors

FLOSS communities are today known for producing good quality software using a different development approach than proprietary software producers. 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 communities could benefit by adopting:

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

Education professionals may be aware that FLOSS-like principles can benefit education, but there has been no systematic and comprehensive approach to map and transfer those principles, 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.

However, Teachers Without Borders, a non-profit based in Seattle, is currently developing a new OER website where members can take courses, discuss their findings with people around the world, and publish their work, all on the same website. Their goal is to connect educators and learners from around the world and give free access to a wide variety of courses, thus helping to close the education divide.

Furthermore, WikiEducator is providing free Learning for Content workshops on how to use the wiki and develop OER.

See also

• Open textbooks
• Open education
• Open content
• Open access (publishing)
• Virginia Open Education Foundation
• Cape Town Open Education Declaration
• Free education
• IMS Global
• Question and Test Interoperability specification
• WikiEducator

External links

• OER Commons
• OER Logo Explained, opened, Creative Commons
• Open Educational Resources, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
• UK Open Educational Resources programme
• Sharing Learning Object in an Open Perspective, European Union funded project
• XPERT