3.2: Defining Open Education Resources (OER)
In this subunit, we investigate what constitutes an open educational resource (OER) and explore the implications of open education in a digital age.
Upon successful completion of this subunit you will be able to:
- define open educational resource (OER);
- explain the relationship between digital freedom and learning;
- explain the shortcomings of copyright as a mechanism for regulating ownership of ideas;
- discuss the value of OER in solving real-world problems; and
- identify the implications of OER for learning in a digital age.
Watch this following video from Dr. David Wiley, the co-founder and chief academic officer for Lumen Learning, an organization dedicated to increasing student success to and improving the affordability of education through the adoption of open educational resources (OER) by middle schools, high schools, community and state colleges, and universities.
Previously, Wiley was associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at the David O. McKay School of Education at Brigham Young University. He has dedicated his career to increasing access to educational opportunity for everyone around the world.
In today's knowledge and information-based economies, a nation's wealth and prosperity are based on its resource of ideas. Copyright laws regulate this ownership of ideas, a system that evolved during an era when it was expensive to print, distribute and sell books and other learning materials. In the digital age, we can distribute ideas freely with the press of a button. We witness unprecedented opportunities to expand access to high quality educational resources. Nonetheless, much work is necessary to realize the potential of digital curriculum materials for our national education systems.
This subsection on the ownership of ideas sets the context for our global mission to return to the core business of education: to share knowledge freely.
The concept of open education encapsulates a simple but powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that the open web provides an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge. In short the “open” in "open educational resources" means they must be free and provide the permissions to reuse, revise, remix and redistribute. However, we need to examine the concept in more detail.
Our collective understanding of the definition of OER matures in parallel with increased adoption of open education in our formal education institutions around the world. In nurturing the development of a sustainable open education ecosystem, there is growing consensus that a definition of OER ideally needs to incorporate three interrelated dimensions:
- Educational Values: OER should be freely available;
- Pedagogical Utility: OER should embed the permissions of the Five Rs – reuse, revise, remix, redistribute and retain; and
- Technology Enablers: Technology and media choices should not restrict the permissions of the 5R framework.
We summarize each component below.
- In this section we shift our focus to the benefits of OER from the learner’s perspective. Apart from the obvious benefits of savings related to the direct cost of textbooks and free online learning opportunities, we should ask: Does the “opening” of educational materials generate additional benefits for learning? What does OER enable that closed resources can’t deliver for learning in a digital age?
In this subunit, we:
- Postulate that in a digital world, where the cost of replicating knowledge is near zero, we can widen access to learning for all using the open web and open content licensing.
- Consider the relationships between digital freedom and education.
- Reflect on the shortcomings of copyright as a mechanism to regulate the ownership of ideas in a digital world and the necessity to align our educational practices with our core values in fostering an ecology of creativity in education.
- Provide a framework for defining OER according to three interrelated dimensions:
- Educational Values: OER should be freely available;
- Pedagogical Utility: ensuring OER embeds the permissions of the 4Rs – reuse, revise, remix and redistribute; and
- Technology Enablers: specifying that OER should consider access to the technical tools required for editing and that OER should be meaningfully editable to facilitate the 4R activities.
- Considered the implications of OER for learning in a digital age with a focus on solving real-world problems.
Challenge Summary
Summary: Identify key implications of OER for learning in a digital age from available research. Time: 30–40 minutes.
