I'll preface this by saying it's my own opinion and doesn't reflect the position of my institution, Duke, or the particular unit that I work for.

This is a rather complex question and institutions really have to think about the motivations for making these materials available and what the long-term return on investment will be. To me, despite all the talk in academia about "knowledge sharing" and the "community of scholars and learners", development of Open Educational Resources boils down to some basic economic decisions. I also think the basic question can be asked about content repositories.

On the surface, Open Educational Resources appear to be a good idea. An institution offers up course materials, lectures and other materials to a broader audience outside the institution. The institution, the thinking goes, can open up disucssion of ideas to the broader scholarly community and reach out to non-traditional learners. With content repositories and larger OER efforts, the idea is that faculty can share course materials like applets, presentations and the like, making it easier to develop their own courses - you spend less time developing an applet to demonstrate a concept and more time actually teaching.

But, let's examine what drives both institutions and individual faculty. Universities aren't in the business of selling content to students. They are organizations whose core business is research - development of new ideas and concepts that turn into patents or influence in the marketplace of ideas - and the leverage of that research in creating educational experiences for the next generation of scholars, public officials and business leaders.

OER's have limited utility to individuals studying in a particular area. One might draw on the material in research to get a different perspective, but the primary focus of learning is the interaction one has with the faculty researcher and other students in a common course or program of learning. If the content in and of itself were valuable, universities could just close their doors and we'd all be getting Masters and PhD's through reading journals and books in complete isolation. I don't see that happening anytime soon.

For content repositories and OER's, there's even less incentive for faculty to contribute. As a professional scholar, what you have to sell to a potential employer is a unique record of research and publication and aspects of your teaching that attract new students. If I'm a faculty member that develops a great little application that demonstrates a concept and it's a valuable component of my teaching that attracts and keeps students in my classes, why should I put it on the open web for anyone to use? Doesn't that diminish my competitiveness in the higher-ed marketplace?

In the short term, I feel that open access content makes for good pr for institutions and a way for individual faculty to make a name for themselves as being in the "first wave" of the "open source" or "creative commons" movements. It's expensive to make this content available - there's licensing of excerpts of material, videotaping of class sessions, and server development and administration to take care of. While it might attract some new students or get some good press for the university, it's not a sustainable model - making the material available doesn't necessarily result in any new students paying tuition or alumni that can make financial contributions to the university. I just don't see the core economic incentives that would make it a part of the normal course of business at institutions.

posted February 1, 2008

Open resources, I think, is already having an impact on the thinking about what is higher education and where is the value. Is it in information? In the organization of the information around some syllabus or other structure? Is it in the guidance and perspective injected by a live, f2f or online instructor? Or is it in the credits received for engaging successfully in the course of study (and paying for it), with all the cache that comes from a particular institution. like MSU, PSU, or MIT?

Interestingly (to me), there appears to be a subtle shift in the notion of "market" for higher ed. From 1995 to 2005, roughly, we focused on market size, share, tuition revenue, niche, etc. Now I sense that institutions are returning to a mission orientation and to values of access and affordability. (Do we thank the Spellings Commission for that?) MIT took a role in shaking up the values when it was the first to open its courseware for public inspection and consumption.

posted February 1, 2008

I think they will/are having a number of impacts, but the one I am qualified to speak about is the marketing impact of open educational resources. In my particular line of business, as a graduate admissions consultant, I have had a number of clients become attracted to MIT specifically because of their encounter with MIT's OpenCourseWare. I think this points to a likely trend where we will see potential students making admissions application decisions at least partially upon their ability to sample the content. Combined with resources like ratemyprofessor.com as well as standard ways of finding out about a school via its website, this gives potential customers (and students are customers whether some in the academy want to think of them that way or not) a really rich opportunity to gain insight into a school. The takeaway from that is such open educational resources need to be good if they are going to effectively market a school.
From my perspective better informed applicants who really understand what they will be learning will be better students. I would not be surprised if admissions offices started incorporating open educational resources into their marketing efforts. At the moment, both RSM and INSEAD bring professors to select cities to give mini-classes as part of those MBA programs recruiting efforts, so it easy for me to imagine OpenCourseWare playing the same sort of role in the school selection process. For lower ranked schools this could be unique way of showing their academic strengths.

Links:

• http://adam-markus.blogspot.com/search/label/School%20Selection

posted February 1, 2008

I’m not entirely certain we all share an understanding of what exactly the promise of open resources might be. Certainly there are reasons to be enthusiastic about expanding the community around open resources. In general, I believe it is a good thing. But when Richard notes the various possibilities relative to the value of higher ed: “information,” “the organization of the information around some syllabus or other structure,” “ the guidance and perspective injected by a live, f2f or online instructor,” or “in the credits received for engaging successfully in the course of study…”, what I understand to be the purpose (if not the way value is perceived, an importance nuance Richard implies), it is the learning that matters, however we assess and define it. I have written elsewhere that the fatal fallacy of education is the confusion of content with teaching and learning, and the extent to which the production and organization of content distract us from the deeper purpose, the less likely we are to achieve that purpose—learning. In that context and to that end, the distinction between open source and proprietary content is largely irrelevant and the prospective innovation, unless the open source revolution is leveraged to engage students in the selection, evaluation, and the production of that content, will be less than incremental.

posted February 1, 2008

Hello, Chris.
I believe Open Education Resources have the potential of making a major impact on higher education, as well as secondary and primary education. However, like many things, we'll have to go through several iterations and extensive experimentation before we start to realize its true potential. It will require changes in the way source material is presented, instruction is conducted and measured, and many other factors. What we have today is just the beginning. As more material and media are designed for this application, the stronger it will become.

posted February 1, 2008

Some may be surprised as I write from a publisher perspective, but I agree completely with Gary - a fatal fallacy of education is the confusion of content with teaching and learning. Perhaps publishers have encouraged some of that confusion but the best publishers do realize that content (be a textbook, digital material, or technology tools) is just part of a course or learning experience and is created to support teaching and learning. I think its key that the same mistake not be made with Open Educational Resources that has been made with proprietary content. The greatest impact will happen if the growth of Open Education Resources is accompanied by an even greater increase in attention to sound instructional design. Indeed, there needs to be more attention to incorporating any content into successful teaching strategies, open source or proprietary. When that is done, we publishers might see our roles diminish, but we will be percieved as a more valued partner in education (and less the whipping boy for all things horrible in the content world)

posted February 1, 2008

As someone who is just beginning to learn more about OERs, I’m not sure how to answer the question of whether it’s living up to its promise, since I’m not exactly sure what its promise is. After reading some initial background materials (the OCWC site and the Cape Town OED site), the promise of OER is not that much clearer to me. As others have already pointed out, its impact apparently will be felt in places where educators lack resources but have the motivation to take advantage of access to free content. To get a better assessment about the perceived impact of OER, I’d go and ask some of the signatories of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration why they signed it. Why are there so many signatories from Poland, for example? What do they see in it?

The main issue I have with OER at the moment is that education is about a lot more than content, as Gary and others have pointed out. The OCW Consortium Institution Memorandum of Cooperation (the document which truly defines what it means to participate in making OERs available through OCWC; see
http://www.ocwconsortium.org/ocwcforum/docs/MOC_Institution_090406_OCWC.pdf) specifies that “high-quality university level educational materials” implicitly vetted by higher education institutions is the admission ticket to the OCWC. Based on this definition, OERs are a relatively small piece of the entire puzzle. Education is an entire infrastructure in which content resources are an important component but certainly not the only one.

OERs appear to be very useful in some contexts, but hard to see how free content by itself will result in sweeping change – certainly not on the scale implied by the sweeping statements of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, particularly in its opening statement that “Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge.” Based on how OER is defined in the declaration, this statement reflects a confusion between education and knowledge and between education and learning, as if education is generated just by content-learner interaction. The second sentence is just plain pompous in its overreaching assumptions. When will everyone on the planet have access to this world of ubiquitious access? It reminds me of the label “No Child Left Behind,” frankly. It also assumes that OER will somehow become the focal point for human knowledge generation and that faculty-created and university-vetted course materials are the principal engine for human knowledge generation. I don’t buy it -- how is OER any more a world for generating human knowledge than Google or the Web itself?

Even as content, many OERs are of limited value. For example, the recent launch of Open Yale Courses exquisitely illustrates how educators can confuse content delivery with learning, with the result being open courseware of dubious quality. [also see URL #1 below]

Even with highly regarded open courseware such as offered by MIT’s “international Internet guru” Professor Walter Lewin, [also see URL #2 below] MIT itself has noted the limitations of this approach and is moving away from it with its residential students. [URL #3 below]

What’s disappointing to me about the OCWC and CTOED sites so far is that I did not come away with a clear sense of what kind of impact OERs are making. So, perhaps OERs will have a huge impact for some learners and be an incremental innovation in other respects. Perhaps there are some unforeseen, serendipitous events which will change its effect. But I haven’t yet seen any visible reasons to expect a huge impact. Has someone else?

Links:

• http://senerlearning.com/?q=node/167
• http://senerlearning.com/?q=node/171
• http://senerlearning.com/?q=node/172

posted February 2, 2008

I look at the issue as one of an ecosystem. There are several simultaneous motivators for the learning behavior. Usually one is dominant. Some "students" learn because they have a thirst for knowledge.
Others see learning as a means to an end (need the knowledge to get a particular job)
Still others see a university experience and learning as a way to become credentialed as a graduate of a particular program.
Think about HR directors and others looking to hire (such as business owners). We use university names as a way of establishing both a level of innate intelligence/drive (hard to get into), as well as a specific rigor and style of education.
It' isn't clear yet how OERs will factor into the ecosystem, particularly with respect to those who took the courses motivated by some mix of the above.

posted February 2, 2008