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Monograph “Open educational resources”

article

Open Educational Practices and Resources: The olcos Roadmap 2012 Guntram Geser

Submission date: February 2007 Published in: April 2007

Abstract

In the last few years, Open Educational Resources (OER) have gained much attention; for example, due to the extensive media coverage on the Open Courseware initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the work of ever more organisations that promote the use of Creative Commons licenses, and the success of Open Source software-based systems such as Moodle in the educational sector. However, in order to further benefit from Open Educational Resources it is necessary to gain a much clearer understanding of the role OER can play in changing educational practices. Therefore, the Open e-Learning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS) project, which is a Transversal Action under the European eLearning Programme, has produced a roadmap to provide educational decision makers with orientation and recommendations on how to foster the further development and use of OER. This article provides a brief overview of the context and focus of the OLCOS roadmap 2012, explains why it gives priority to open educational practices rather than resources, and presents some drivers/enablers and inhibitors of open educational practices and resources. Furthermore, it summarises some of the recommendations of the roadmap report. The article also mentions and provides links to forty selected projects and resources that illustrate the richness and diversity of the current initiatives in open educational and related resources and practices.

Keywords

open educational resources, roadmap, practices, policies, recommendations

Prácticas y recursos de educación abierta: la hoja de ruta OLCOS 2012 Resumen

En los últimos años, el movimiento Open Educational Resources u OER (recursos educativos abiertos o libres) ha atraído mucha atención debido, por ejemplo, a la amplia cobertura de los medios de comunicación sobre la iniciativa Open Courseware (software didáctico) del Instituto de Tecnología de Massachusetts, al trabajo de cada vez más organizaciones que promueven el uso de licencias Creative Commons y al éxito de sistemas basados en software Open Source (código abierto) como Moodle en el sector educativo. Sin embargo, para beneficiarse más de Open Educational Resources, es necesario entender mucho más claramente la función que OER puede desempeñar en el cambio de prácticas educativas. Por lo tanto, el proyecto Open eLearning Content Observatory Services u OLCOS (servicios del observatorio de contenidos de aprendizaje virtual abierto), que es una acción transversal bajo el programa de e-learning europeo, ha producido una hoja de ruta con orientaciones y rusc vol. 4 n.º 1 (2007) | issn 1698-580x Guntram Geser

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Open Educational Practices and Resources: The OLCOS Roadmap

recomendaciones para los responsables de la toma de decisiones educativas sobre cómo fomentar todavía más el desarrollo y uso de OER. En este artículo se proporciona una breve visión general del contexto y el enfoque de la hoja de ruta OLCOS 2012, se explica por qué se da prioridad a prácticas educativas abiertas más que a recursos y se presentan algunos impulsores/facilitadores e inhibidores de prácticas y recursos de educación abierta. Además, resume algunas de las recomendaciones del informe de la hoja de ruta. El artículo también menciona y proporciona enlaces a cuarenta proyectos y recursos seleccionados que ilustran la riqueza y diversidad de las iniciativas actuales en educación abierta y prácticas y recursos relacionados.

Palabras clave

recursos de educación abierta, hoja de ruta, prácticas, políticas, recomendaciones

1. Context and Focus of the OLCOS Roadmap 2012

among a European community of practice in Open Educational Resources. The project consortium comprises the European Centre for Media Competence (Germany), the European Distance and E-Learning Network (Hungary), the FernUniversitaet in Hagen (Germany), the Mediamaisteri Group (Finland), the Open University of Catalonia (Spain) and the project co-ordinator Salzburg Research / EduMedia Group (Austria). The OLCOS project considers Open Educational Resources to be an important element of policies that want to leverage education and lifelong learning for the knowledge society and economy. However, the project also emphasises that for achieving this goal it is crucial to promote innovation and change in educational practices. In particular, OLCOS warns that delivering OER to the still dominant model of teacher-centred knowledge transfer will have little effect on equipping teachers, students and workers with the competences, knowledge and skills to participate successfully in the knowledge economy and society. Therefore, the roadmap emphasises open educational practices that are based on a competency-focused, constructivist paradigm of learning and promote a creative and collaborative engagement of learners with digital content, tools and services in the learning process. However, it is understood that a shift towards such practices will only happen in the longer term in a step-by-step process. Bringing about this shift will require targeted and sustained efforts by educational leaders at all levels.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are understood to comprise content for teaching and learning, softwarebased tools and services, and licenses that allow for open development and re-use of content, tools and services. The importance of OER has been acknowledged by the UNESCO, the OECD and other international and national organisations that are stakeholders in the creation and sharing of such resources. For example, the OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) is currently carrying out an international survey on OER (which will be completed at the beginning of 2007), and the UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP) facilitates a Community of Interest in OER. This community has been active since October 2005 and has more than 600 members from 94 countries. In this context, the Open e-Learning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS) project has produced an overview of current and likely future developments in OER, through the presenting and assessing of drivers/enablers and inhibitors for open educational practices and resources. The objective has been to identify possible achievements in a time-horizon set for 2012, and to specify how the related challenges could be addressed. The full report will become available for download from the project websitewww1 at the end of January 2007. Furthermore, the project creates and makes available a related set of information packages such as tutorialswww2 and facilitates the exchange of knowledge

[www1] http://www.olcos.org [www2] http://www.wikieducator.org/Open_Educational_Content rusc vol. 4 n.º 1 (2007) | issn 1698-580x Guntram Geser

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2. Priority of open educational practices

as well as own competences and skills. Such contributions may well be the most important value added Open Educational Resources.

Many promoters of Open Educational Resources (OER) do not take into account the legacy of traditional institutional frameworks and pedagogical models. They seem to assume implicitly that easy and free access to a “critical mass of high-value content” (which appears as a standard formula), and tools to make use of such content interactively, would somehow also lead to a change in such frameworks and models. Pedagogical models are often not even considered in the discussion of OER. The reasons for this are manifold: for example, given UNESCO’s goal of fostering free availability of teaching and learning content and tools for developing countries, the educational paradigm must seem of only secondary importance. Another reason is that the discussion of OER has often been dominated by technical and management considerations rather than the perspectives of educational practitioners. And still another reason for a narrow understanding of OER is the focus of many discussions on issues of appropriate licensing schemes. OLCOS promotes the understanding that, before addressing useful open content, tools and licenses, one must consider the pedagogical practices in which these resources could make a difference, i.e. by being used in innovative forms of teaching and learning. This is because if the dominant model is teacher-centred education – a teacher mediates an authoritative textbook or course content and learners digest and reproduce it – the Open Educational Resources will not make for a difference in education. In such a model, teachers may download Web-accessible open teaching material to prepare classes, and students may use some content to prepare material for lessons, but this will remain a one-way channel of content provision, in which a physical textbook or course content is replaced by digital material. Teachers and students will remain consumers of prefabricated content, not themselves becoming creative and collaborative, and they will not “pay back” with own content or through adding value to content from others (e.g. enriched material, use cases, lessons learned, etc.). Therefore, the OLCOS roadmap also promotes a change in the professional role, self-understanding, attitudes and skills of teachers. This would, for example, include a permanent questioning, evaluation and improvement of educational practices and resources, and the sharing within a community of practice of experiences, lessons learned and suggestions on how to better foster the development of students’

3. Important drivers/enablers and inhibitors of open educational practices and resources The OLCOS road mapping covers the following areas: Policies, institutional frameworks and business models; Open Access and open content repositories; and Laboratories of open educational practices and resources. For each of these areas, drivers/enablers and inhibitors of open educational practices and resources are identified and described in detail. The results are summarised in Roadmap Briefs, which may be used as starting points for discussing initiatives in OER and open educational practices on a strategic level. In this article, only some of the most important drivers/ enablers and inhibitors of open educational practices and resources can be presented in brief. These are addressed below, under the headings: educational policies, business models, institutional frameworks, repositories of educational content and communities of practice, and new tools in the box.

3.1. Educational policies Despite massive investments in the e-learning infrastructure of educational institutions (hardware/software, connectivity, learning management systems, etc.) over the last ten years or so, little impact has been achieved with regard to changing educational practices. Therefore, educational policy increasingly demands a stronger commitment from directors, managers and staff of educational institutions regarding educational innovation and organisational change. There is growing concern that the educational institutions would not support learners effectively in acquiring the competences and skills required to participate successfully in the knowledge society and economy. This is a pressing issue with respect to lifelong learning agendas that want to ensure economic competitiveness and employability of workers for higher value jobs (knowledge-based industries). Hence, particularly in the area of ICT-based lifelong learning, we may expect a growing understanding of the importance of Open Educational Resources to drive participation. A point in case are the recent experiments of

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some Open and Distance Teaching Universities to offer open self-learning courses with the goal of “converting” users into registered students (such projects are currently carried out by the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities, the Open University NL and the Open University UK). One background for this experimentation is the global competition in Higher Education and the foreseeable decline in student numbers in Europe due to demographic trends.

sharing and re-use of Open Educational Resources. In universities, greater value is often attached to research than to teaching, in particular when it comes to academic promotion. Hence, there is usually little incentive and support for faculty to experiment with innovative IT-enhanced forms of teaching and to excel in producing and sharing educational material. In fact, experts widely agree that appropriate institutional rewards (e.g. significant relevance in academic or other promotion) are the most important factor for successful OER initiatives by academic and educational institutions. Altruistic motivations or the possibility “to gain reputation” may not be strong enough drivers to invest the required time and effort to create OER beyond typical courseware such as lecture notes and reading lists. However, there are also two other important issues in OER from an institutional perspective: Firstly, there is often a lack of clear-cut regulations regarding IPR/copyrights; secondly, OER initiatives that aim to promote the creation and sharing of OER among teachers will need to invest considerable effort in training and technical support.

3.2. Business models At present there exists a healthy level of competition among leading institutions in providing free access to educational resources. Many initiatives started after the extensive media coverage for M.I.T.’s Open Courseware project, which was announced in April 2001 (for example, in the second half of 2006 the international Open Courseware Consortium had over 100 members). However, the larger and more widely known projects are substantially funded and business models for sustainable OER initiatives are a major point of concern. In fact, business models in OER are tricky and the right mix of income streams must be found (e.g. public or/and private funding, sponsorships, donations, fee-based services). This will become even more difficult as there will be a growing competition for scarce funding resources (also within institutions). Furthermore, while currently we see much provision of static courseware (most often in closed formats), “latecomers” to the OER movement will need to be convinced through highly useful resources and active users who are willing to openly share own educational material. It is also noteworthy that educational publishers consider the OER movement as a threat to their commercial interests, which will make it difficult to establish innovative private–public partnerships related to OER. Over the coming years, there may also be a widening gap between traditional educational content that is protected by Digital Rights Management technology and an increasing circulation of content that is openly shared (e.g. based on Creative Commons licenses).

3.4. Repositories of educational content and communities of practice Over the last ten years or so, solid know-how has been developed on how to make accessible, and provide for federated search of, information in distributed repositories. This includes making use of the Open Archive Initiative approach based on its Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, Peer-to-Peer repositories and/or implementations by building on the Simple Query Interface (SQI) for federated search across learning object repositories. Yet, at present, there exists little experience in how to effectively support communities of practice through educational repositories. Educational initiatives, particularly larger national ones, still follow a top-down strategy that tries to deliver a “critical mass” of learning objects to teacher-centred education. What is often not understood is that this delivery mode reinforces the still dominant teacher-centred paradigm of education and runs counter to the goal of innovating teaching and learning practices. In order to see innovative educational practices emerge and flourish, teachers and students must be enabled to become creative and share resources that they find useful in certain learning contexts. Hence, educational repositories will need to think more carefully about how to be useful

3.3. Institutional frameworks The established culture of academic and higher education institutions does not particularly foster the creation, rusc vol. 4 n.º 1 (2007) | issn 1698-580x Guntram Geser

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for communities of practice, which is of critical importance if OER initiatives want to grow based on user contributions and sharing of content among users. Usually a provider model that sets out to do something for communities of practice – most often to provide access to a database of content, will not work out. Rather, such communities must be enabled to do and achieve something themselves. In fact, the notion of a community of practice implies that members of such a community share an interest in promoting particular practices and want to further develop know-how both in addressing certain problems, and in resources such as educational content. In order to support communities of practice, educational repositories will need to implement available “new tools in the box”.

organisations, business information services or sections of international news services. For educational repositories it will also be essential to connect teachers and students more effectively to the body of codified knowledge in certain domains, e.g. thesauri, classification systems, domain ontologies. It is expected that over the next five to ten years Semantic Web applications will provide novel ways of making use of such knowledge resources. For example, there are already interesting examples of concepts-based access, semantic filter & browser applications, and Social Software tools such as semantic Wikis.

4. Recommendations for stakeholders

3.5. New tools in the box

The OLCOS roadmap report provides a comprehensive set of recommendations for stakeholders, from educational policy makers and funding bodies to individual teachers and students. Among the suggested actions are the following: Educational policy makers and funding bodies should demand that academic and educational resources that have been fully or to a larger part publicly funded are made freely accessible under an appropriate license (e.g. Creative Commons or similar). For example, licenses for educational content ideally should be free from restrictions to modify, combine and repurpose the content. With respect to educational open access repositories, funding bodies should concentrate on fostering the development of widely used, technologically state-of-the-art and sustainable repositories. Project selection criteria should demand that proposers show an in-depth understanding of how an as broad as possible active usage of the repository can be established. Funding schemes should provide for a longer-term perspective, through initial funding for achieving full operation, and further funding based on a critical assessment of actual usage. Boards, directors and supervisors of educational institutions are advised to scrutinize whether educational institutions employ innovative approaches beyond classical teacher-centred knowledge transfer. For example, they should ask educational institutions about what amount of teachers’ work concentrates on coaching students in identifying real world problems, clarifying study approaches, assessing the relevance of information and observations, and critically discussing study results.

The last few years have seen a tremendous increase in the use of Social Software tools and services such as Weblogs, Wikis, social networking, content and bookmarks sharing, etc. beyond the educational sector. As this new generation of Web-based tools and services empowers learners to easily create and share content even the smallest “spill-over” could have a considerable impact in terms of changes in educational practices. However, at present, the use of Social Software by individual teachers and educational organisations is at an experimental stage. Currently, the Web environment is changing dramatically and digital content has become highly fluid. It can be more easily produced, syndicated, assembled, and wrapped in different ways. In addition, services that deliver some type of information can be combined to provide astonishing new ways of integrating content (so called “mashups”). One important basis of the explosion of services is the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) Web feed mechanism which has become a standard for content distribution and syndication. This can be used by educational content access providers for bringing fresh, continuously updated information onto their portals. Of particular interest will be to allow individual learners and study groups to select feeds on certain subjects that provide them with thematically relevant content including podcasts (audio) and videocasts. However, RSS feeds do not necessarily have to have an educational label. Rather, students who are focusing on a particular research question will often gain from subscribing to feeds from non-governmental agencies, scientific


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With respect to sharing and reusing of open resources from a common pool of content, tools and services, the roadmap suggests establishing formal co-operations between educational organisations. Among the positive effects, not only are cost reductions in the development and management of resources considered, but also a leveraging of their quality. For example, the fact that any resources that are made available will be assessed critically by partner institutions will also impact favourably on internal quality criteria and control. Reward mechanisms and supportive measures are considered as being vital in initiatives for open educational resources in order to drive the development and sharing of resources at an institutional level. Boards, directors and supervisors will need to question established values, traditions and practices: for example, the greater value that is often attached to research as compared to teaching, particularly when it comes to academic promotion. The roadmap also stresses that in many institutions it is far from clear who owns IPR/copyrights and what licenses should be employed when making resources available to others. A recommendation here is that contracts of employed researchers and educators should acknowledge the IPR of authors, but require non-exclusive copyrights for the institution to make educational resources accessible under appropriate licenses. In addition, mechanisms should be implemented that (semi-)automatically attach licenses to material that is made available. With respect to the set of recommendations for learners, it may be interesting that the roadmap invites students to challenge teachers with requests such as: Why not use Weblogs to share ideas, observations and commented links to useful study material? Why not use a Wiki for a collaborative study project? Why not subscribe to thematic RSS-feeds that provide a project with relevant and regularly updated “real world” information? A further recommendation for students is to have an e-portfolio for documenting and reflecting the progress and results of their study work, and to make results they are proud of accessible through an open access repository under an open content license.

Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (COSL) / OpenEd conferences Commonwealth of Learning – Learning Object Repository Connexions (online platform for managing and sharing open course modules) Creative Commons Development Gateway – Open Educational Resources (aims at putting the Internet to work for developing countries) Directory of Open Access Journals Edublogs Awards EducaNext (open content brokerage service for Higher Education) Education Podcast Network Elgg.net (educational community software initiative) Freesound (a growing database of sounds that are licensed under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License) GLEF Learning Interchange & Edutopia (George Lucas Educational Foundation) Global SchoolNet Foundation (promotes international cooperation in problem/project-based learning) GlobalText project (aims to create a free library of 1,000 electronic textbooks for students in the developing world) GLOBE – Global Learning Objects Brokered Exchange (a collaboration of Ariadne, Education.au, eduSource Canada, MERLOT and NIME) INDICARE (Informed Dialogue about Consumer Acceptability of Digital Rights Management Solutions in Europe) project iRights.info (an information resource on IPR and copyright; information in German)

5. Selected projects and resources The following forty projects and resources have been selected to illustrate the richness and diversity of the current initiatives in open educational and related resources and practices: AVOIR – African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources rusc vol. 4 n.º 1 (2007) | issn 1698-580x Guntram Geser

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Lernmodule.net (open content repository for the school sector in Germany) LibriVox (promotes free, public-domain audio books) M.I.T. Open Courseware (OCW) MathWorld (an extensive free mathematics resource) OECD – Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI): Open Educational Resources project/survey Open Education Association (promotes the idea of OER among university and college professors) Open Educator (focuses on knowledge sharing, tools and resources on OSS) Open Knowledge Network (promotes collection and sharing of local knowledge by using flexible technical solutions; operates in Africa, South Asia and Latin America) OpenCourse.org (“Open Content + Community = Open Course”) OpenDOAR – Directory of Open Access Repositories OpenLearn – Open University UK Project Gutenberg Public Knowledge Project (develops free, open source software for the management, publishing and indexing of journals and conferences) Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking International Consortium (supported by the Soros Foundations Network) Schoolforge (wants schools to enjoy the benefits of Free and Open Source Software) Science Commons (aims at removing barriers to the flow of scientific knowledge and technical information) Survey of Open Content Projects in Non-Western Countries daniel, john; west, paul; mackintosh, wayne (2006). “Exploring the role of ICTs in addressing educational needs: identifying the myths and the miracles”. In: NADEOSA 10th Anniversary Conference. Pretoria, South Africa [online article]. downes, stephen (2006). Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources. In: OECD expert meeting on Open Educational Resources (6-7 February 2006: Malmö, Sweden). [Date of consultation: December 12, 2006]. european commission. directorate-general for education and culture (2004, November). “Key Competences for Lifelong Learning: a European Reference Framework”. In: Implementation of the “Education and Training” 2010 Work Programme. Working Group B “Key Competences”. [Date of consultation: December 12, 2006]. holmes, brian (2005). “E-learning content – a European policy perspective”. In: Open Culture: Accessing and Sharing Knowledge Workshop (27-29 June 2005: University of Milan). [Date of consultation: December 12, 2006]. hylén, jan (2006). “Open Educational Resources: Opportunities and Challenges”. In: Open Education 2006:

Community, Culture, and Content (27-29 September 2006: Utah State University, Logan, UT). [Final proceedings online] [Date of consultation: December 12, 2006]. oecd – Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (2006). “Notes from Expert Meeting on Open Educational Resources”. (6-7 February 2006: Malmö, Sweden). [Date of consultation: December 12, 2006]. owen, m.; grant, l., sayers, s., facer, k. (2006). Opening Education: Social software and learning [online report]. Bristol: Futurelab. [Date of consultation: December 12, 2006]. wiley, david (2006, September). “On the Sustainability of Open Educational Resource Initiatives in Higher Education” [online article]. Utah State University: Center for Open and Sustainable Learning. [Date of consultation: December 12, 2006]. willinsky, john (2006). The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship [online book]. Cambridge and London: MIT Press. [Date of consultation: December 12, 2006].

Recommended reference geser, guntram (2007). “Open Educational Practices and Resources: The OLCOS Roadmap 2012”. In: “Open educational resources” [on-line monograph]. Revista de Universidad y Sociedad del Conocimiento (RUSC). Vol. 4, no. 1. UOC. [Date of consultation: dd/mm/yy]. issn 1698-580X

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About the author Guntram Geser Head of Information Society Research, Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft m.b.H. [email protected] Guntram Geser leads the Department of Information Society Research of Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft m.b.H., Austria. He has in-depth experience in EU-funded projects (IST priority and other programmes) and national projects as carried out in industrial competency centres. Main tasks in such projects are the development of ICT research & development roadmaps, technology monitoring & assessment, and studies on ICT adoption, usage, and impact. Exemplary projects are EPOCH - Excellence in Processing Open Heritage (FP6-IST Network of Excellence, 2004-2008), http://www.epoch-net.org; DigiCULT Forum (FP5-IST accompanying measure, 20022004), http://www.digicult.info; EP 2010 - The Future of Electronic Publishing in 2010 (Strategic study for the European Commission, DG Information Society, Directorate E, 2002/2003), http://ep2010.salzburgresearch.at. Guntram Geser holds a Doctorate (Communication and Political Sciences) from the Paris Lodron University, Salzburg, and a Master of Advanced Studies in Telematics Management from the Donau-University Krems, Austria. Before joining Salzburg Research he concentrated on cultural studies of technology and media in projects carried out in Berlin (Technical University Berlin, Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie) and Amsterdam (Instituut for Film- en Televisiewetenschap, Nederlands Filmmuseum). He also lectured at the Vienna Interdisciplinary Research Unit for the Study of (Techno-)Science and Society and worked as media consultant for the Austrian Cultural Service.
