Volume 14, Number 2, June 2013 Special Issue: Open Educational Resources: Opening Access to Knowledge Guest-edited by Rory McGreal, Wanjira Kinuthia and Stewart Marshall

EN:

Since the birth of the World Wide Web, educators have been exchanging ideas and sharing resources online. They are all aware of the turmoil in higher education created by freely available content, including some hopeful developments charted in this issue. Interest has grown steadily over the past decade in making a university-level education openly available to students around the globe who would otherwise be overlooked, and recommendations for how to do this are well documented (e.g., UNESCO, 2002; OECD, 2007). Initiatives in the United States (Thille, 2012), Canada (Stacey, 2011b), Africa (OER Africa, n.d.), and the United Kingdom (JISC, 2012) are easily accessed and case studies abound (e.g., Barrett, Grover, Janowski, van Lavieren, Ojo, & Schmidt, 2009). Supporting the widespread availability of OER is a goal that Athabasca University (AU) has embraced through association with the Commonwealth of Learning and by becoming a charter member of the OER University (OERu, 2011). The use of OER in AU programs has strategic local implications that go beyond the five reasons for institutions to engage in OER projects described by Hylén (2006). Recently at AU explorations have begun into the potential of using OER in course design and production.

EN:

As the world becomes more digitized, there will be an increasing need to make available learning resources in electronic format for access by information and communication technologies. The question education will face is whether these learning resources will be available for learners to access at no cost or affordable cost so that there will be equity in access by anyone regardless of location, status, or background. With initiatives such as the Millennium Development Goals and Education For All by the United Nations (United Nations, 2011) learning materials must be available as open education resources to achieve the goals. Currently, most learning materials are available at a cost for people to purchase to learn, or they have to travel to a specific location (school or library) to access learning materials. In some parts of the world, especially in developing countries, these costs are prohibitive, preventing learners from achieving a basic level of education so that they can be productive in society and improve their quality of life (Bhavnani et al., 2008). Some would say that people in remote locations and developing countries do not have computers to access learning materials. It is true that many do not have desktop or laptop computers to access learning materials, but they have mobile devices and are now obtaining tablets with wireless capability to allow them to access learning materials from anywhere and at any time. These countries are bypassing the wired desktop stage and moving directly to wireless mobile technology (Bhavnani et al., 2008). Storing open education resources (OER) in electronic repositories will allow learners to access the resources using mobile technology. With mobile technologies, learners can complete coursework and assessments from anywhere and send their work to their tutors electronically and receive feedback (GSMA, 2011).

EN:

E-learning technologies have allowed authoring and playback of standardized reusable learning objects (RLO) for several years. Effective mobile learning requires similar functionality at both design time and runtime. Mobile devices can play RLO using applications like SMILE, mobile access to a learning management system (LMS), or other systems which deploy content to mobile learners (Castillo & Ayala, 2008; Chu, Hwang, & Tseng, 2010; Hsu & Chen, 2010; Nakabayashi, 2009; Zualkernan, Nikkhah, & Al-Sabah, 2009). However, implementations which author content in a mobile context do not typically permit reuse across multiple contexts due to a lack of standardization. Standards based (IMS and SCORM) authoring implementations exist for non-mobile platforms (Gonzalez-Barbone & Anido-Rifon, 2008; Griffiths, Beauvoir, Liber, & Barrett-Baxendale, 2009; Téllez, 2010; Yang, Chiu, Tsai, & Wu, 2004). However, this paradigm precludes capturing learning where and when it occurs. Consequently, RLO authored for e-learning lack learner generated content, especially with timely, relevant, and location aware examples.

EN:

For several years, the importance of continuous education has been stressed by several governmental and non-governmental institutions (Janssen & Schuwer, 2012; Marshall & Casserly, 2006). Education is seen as important both for personal growth and empowerment for one’s personal wellbeing as well as for developing the required professional capabilities needed in today’s society. In his 2011 State of the Union address President Obama put emphasis on the government’s ambitions to “out-innovate and out-educate” the rest of the world. Almost at the same time, at the Davos World Economic Forum (2011), the urgency of appropriate education was stressed, observing that the current lack of adequately educated people hinders prosperity and economic growth in the near future. The OECD is preparing a proposal to translate these intentions into a concrete policy.

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Foundations like Hewlett, Mellon, and Gates provided start-up funding and support that nurtured the field of open educational resources (OER) from infancy to a robust early adolescence characterized by energy and idealism (Casserly & Smith, 2008). However, foundation grants typically focus on establishing exemplars and cannot be relied on for sustaining ongoing operations or generating widespread adoption. One strategy for sustaining and expanding OER is for governments and public funding to take over from the early stage funding foundations provided (Stacey, 2010).

EN:

This article presents the rationale, common practices, challenges, and some personal anecdotes from a journal editor on the production, use, and re-use of peer-reviewed, scholarly articles as open educational resources (OER). The scholarly and professional discourse related to open educational resources has largely focused on open learning objects, courseware, and textbooks. However, especially in graduate education, articles published in scholarly journals are often a major component of the course content in formal education. In addition, open access journal articles are critical to expanding access to knowledge by scholars in the developing world and in fostering citizen science, by which everyone has access to the latest academic information and research results. In this article, I highlight some of the challenges, economic models, and evidence for quality of open access journal content and look at new affordances provided by the Net for enhanced functionality, access, and distribution. In the seventeen years since I graduated with a doctorate degree, the climate and acceptance of open access publishing has almost reversed itself. I recall a conversation with my PhD supervisor in which he argued that publishing online was not a viable option as the product would not have permanency, scholarly recognition, or the prestige of a paper publication. His comments reflect the confusion between online resources and those described as open access, but as well illustrate the change in academic acceptance and use of open access products during the past decade. The evolution from paper to online production and consumption is a disruptive technology in which much lower cost and increased accessibility of online work opens the product to a completely new group of potential users. In the case of OER these consumers are primarily students, but certainly access to scholars from all parts of the globe and the availability to support citizen science (Silvertown, 2009) should not be underestimated.

EN:

In its first decade (2001-2010) the OER movement has been carried by numerous relevant and successful projects around the globe. These were sometimes large-scale but more often not, and they were primarily initiated by innovating educational institutions and explorative individual experts. What has remained, however, is the quest for a sustainable perspective, in spite of the many attempts in the OER community for clear-cut solutions to the problem of sustainability. This is a major barrier for mainstreaming the OER approach in national educational systems. At the end of the first decade, and more so at the beginning of the second decade (2011-2020), we are witnessing in a few countries emerging efforts to develop and establish a national OER approach. That is required in order to break down the barrier for mainstreaming OER. Making the OER approach sustainable cannot be left to the educational institutions only, but should be facilitated in a national setting.

EN:

Over the last decade, open educational resources (OER) initiatives have created new possibilities for knowledge-sharing practices. This research examines how, where, and when OER are attracting attention in the higher education sector and explores to what extent the OER discussion has moved beyond the English-speaking world. This study analysed English, Spanish, and Portuguese OER queries over a long-term period (2007-2011). The data retrieval was conducted using four online platforms: two academic journal databases (Web of Knowledge and Scopus), one video-sharing Web site (YouTube), and one document-sharing Web site (Scribd). The number (more than 32,860) of search results collected indicate an increasing interest in online OER discussion across languages, particularly outside academic journal databases. Additionally, a widening ‘language gap’ between OER discussions in English and other languages was identified in several platforms. This research reports some of the cultural and language challenges caused by the expansion of the OER discussion and highlights relevant findings in this field.

EN:

Open educational resources (OER) can be described in numerous ways (Creative Commons, 2012). In this visualization based context, however, OER can be defined as …teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials or techniques used to support access to knowledge. (Hewlett Foundation, 2007) This definition emphasizes some of the aspects highlighted in this article, namely that an OER approach has also been taken to capture and visualize OER materials. In addition reference is made to the forthcoming paper, “How Diagrams Aid Teaching and Learning in STEM Subjects as Exemplified by the Teaching and Learning of Systems Thinking in Practice” (Lane, 2012, in press), which outlines how the educational process often involves a mediated discourse between teachers and learners to aid sense or meaning for both parties.