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Standing up for Little OER

by Martin Weller

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As part of OER week, I engaged in a debate with Patrick McAndrew about the benefits of institutional vs individual approaches to open education.

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Patrick has made a good case for Big OER. In fact when we think of OER, we tend to equate it with Big OER, and I want to push back at that assumption in this presentation
I’d also suggest that thinking about the size of OER chunks is a good way to address many of the other issues around Open education in general, so it’s a route into addressing some of these issues
Analogy with open access publishing – there are two suggested routes, Green which is self-archiving, so you publish in a journal, but get agreement to put your own copy online somewhere. Gold route makes journals open access, by the author paying for publication
There is some debate in the open access world as to whether one route is better than another – Stephen Harnad suggests Green is faster and surer, whereas others argue that Gold maintains a quality filter and makes access easy
So, what are the factors that have led to little OER?
Removal of permission, don’t need to ask someone to do some forms or research, or to publish something, or to try a different format, or adopt a different teaching approach
Big OER tends to be very intentional – it says this is what you will learn, this is the level, these are the learning outcomes, etc. That’s very useful at times, but I would argue it also goes against what has been really successful in terms of the internet
For a start it separates out what is learning content – it says this stuff is for learning and this isn’t. But you could argue that everything we produce is potentially an OER. We produce all these things and with not much effort we can make them shareable digital artefacts. And then they can be used in unpredictable ways. For example you might take a piece of software code that programmers have deemed aesthetically beautiful and analyse it in a poetry class. But big OER tends to work against this unpredictable use
Jonathan Zittrain says that the beauty of the internet is that it is a generative system,ie it is open and produces unpredictable outcomes.John Naughton calls it a machine for springing surprisesThe highly prescriptive nature of Big OER works against this
There are lots of issues around little OER though, which I’ll address
Firstly, the issue of time always comes up. How do people find the time to do all this stuff?I would suggest though that viewing it as an addition is the wrong way to think of it. It acts as a replacement for many current activities, which are often overly time consuming themselves. For example, having a good online network means you can disseminate work effectively, it saves time on research, maybe you don’t need to go to so many conferences to maintain a network, etcAlso, thinking back to that slide where I said everything was an OER, you can view it as almost frictionless – it doesn’t take much to turn these into open artefacts
Another big factor is that of recognition – why bother spending time with all this when it won’t be recognised by university or help with promotion.
QualityBut also big oer encourages a project based approach, where real power comes from the just share already approach.

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Mohsen Saadatmand, Researcher/ PhD Candidate at University of Helsinki Tags martin weller 8 months ago
Mohsen Saadatmand, Researcher / PhD Candidate at University of Helsinki 1 year ago
pascal le rudulier, Self employed consultant Tags oer open-education 1 year ago

Standing up for Little OER Presentation Transcript

Stand up for Little OER Martin Weller
GranularityBig and Little OER
Big LittleInstitutional Individualhigh reputation cheapgood teaching quality, web (2) nativelittle reversioning easily remixed andrequired reusedexpensive low production qualityoften not web native reputation ‘buyer beware’reuse limited distributed
The Green and Gold Route to OA http://www.flickr.com/photos/ucumari/1695363828/
Is there a ‘better’ way? • Harnad - Green OA is ‘faster’ and ‘surer’http://www.flickr.com/photos/chefranden/83594459/
Factors leading to Little OER
Good tools
Publish yourself platforms
Power of networks
Removal of filtershttp://www.flickr.com/photos/httpwwwflickrcompeoplenadar/3349883/
Big OER is too intentional
Everything is OER Code Lectures/Teaching contentResearch papersDebate Ideas Conferences Data
Generative systemshttp://www.flickr.com/photos/vimages/2910864052/
Issues
Timehttp://www.flickr.com/photos/tonivc/2283676770/
Recognitionhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/cdevers/4602805654/
Qualityhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/12495774@N02/2405297371/
Implicit message
So…• Is a hybrid approach best?• Is a hybrid approach possible?• How do you encourage Little OER?• Universities tend to projectise everything, so make it all big OER