Open Educational ResourcesAn Introduction

Robert Schuwer and Fred MulderOpen Universiteit (Netherlands)

EADI IMWG Antwerpen13 september 2012

Who am I?

• Robert Schuwer

• Open Universiteit (Netherlands)

• Background in mathematics and computer science

• Since 2006 involved with projects on open educational resources

• Chair of the Dutch SURF Special Interest Group OER (http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=3681051)

Page 2

What are Open Educational Resources?

• Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning or research materials that are in the public domain or released with an intellectual property license that allows for free use, adaptation, and distribution. (UNESCO, 2002)

• David Wiley (2007): 4 R’s

– Reuse – copy verbatim

– Redistribute – share with others

– Revise – adapt and edit

– Remix – combine with others

History (1)

• 2001 MIT

• 2002 UNESCO congress in Paris

– Coined the term OER

• 2006 Open Courseware Consortium

– The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model.

– Currently > 200 members

Page 4

History (2)

• 2009 Netherlands Wikiwijs program

– National initiative to make OER mainstream

– Initiated by Ministry of Education

• 2011 UNESCO chairs OER

– network which focuses on capacity building on an institutional, national and international level and research that will contribute to the growing investigation of the OER phenomenon, and its potential and impact on education and learning.

– Fred Mulder, Open Universiteit, Netherlands

– Rory McGreal, Athabasca University, Canada

Page 5

Trends and developments (1)• Transition from OER → Open Education

– OER, Open Teaching and open learning services

– Most recent: Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC)

• Paris Declaration on OER (2012)

– Recommendation to States to support to its fullest capacity awareness, creation and use of OER

– Accepted on UNESCO World Congress on OER, Paris, 22 June 2012

• Existence of infrastructural components to contribute to an ecosystem of open education. E.g.:

– Open communities (OpenStudy)

– P2P university

– Saylor.org

Page 6

Trends and developments (2)

• European Union started a public consultation

– Opening up Education – a proposal for a European Initiative to enhance education and skills development through new technologies

– Important role for OER

Page 7

Why OER? (1)

• Do we really have an alternative?

– Sir John Daniels, former President of the Commonwealth of Learning 2012:

– “First, UNESCO’s 2009 World Conference on Higher Education identified rapidly increasing demand as the major trend because nearly one-third of the world’s population (29.3%) is under the age of 15.

– Today there are 165 million people enrolled in tertiary education. Projections suggest that that participation will peak at 263 million in 2025. Accommodating the additional 98 million students would require more than four major campus universities (30,000 students) to open every week for the next fifteen years. This suggests that alternative models of provision will be needed.”

Page 8

Source: http://www.col.org/resources/speeches/2012presentations/Pages/2012-04-12.aspx

Image: Integration and Application Network, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (ian.umces.edu/imagelibrary/)

Why OER? (2)

• Technical argument

– Education = sharing

– Copy and distributing is free online

• Political argument

– Publicly funded materials should be publicly available

• Quality argument

– Permission to make changes and improvements

• Innovation argument

– Increase quality and decrease cost of content infrastructure

– Accelerates innovation in education

Page 9

From David Wiley: Why be Open http://slideshare.net/opencontent/

Challenges

• Localization

• Business models

• Access to internet

– Mobile learning?

• Quality of OER

– Difficult to determine

• Copyright laws

• Language

Page 10

Thank You!

Open Courseware Consortium: http://ocwconsortium.org

UNESCO OER: http://bit.ly/rDnfcU

OER Knowledge cloud: http://oerknowledgecloud.com

Policies for OER Uptake (POERUP): http://poerup.referata.com

Robert Schuwer

Mail: robert.schuwer@ou.nl

LinkedIn: http://nl.linkedin.com/in/robertschuwer

Twitter: @fagottissimo

Page 11