Exploring OER use in Higher Education
The face-to-face element of the Open Knowledge in Higher Education (OKHE) unit was, for me, fascinating. There were areas that we explored that, through my work in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), I’m familiar with such as Open Educational Resources (OER), Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and the use of social media. The topic of open access publishing was a real eye opener for me as I knew little of the logistics and politics around the publication of research materials. Discussions around this particular area were understandably passionate with many participants (including myself) expressing disbelief at the workings of a system that appeared to disproportionately benefit large publishing houses. With regards to openness, it was encouraging to see the green and gold open access routes being required for research to be considered for inclusion in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) from April 2016. Research projects also often result in the creation of large amounts of data and via the REF researchers will be rewarded for making this as open as possible.
Although I’ve thoroughly enjoyed exploring openness in relation to areas that I had no previous knowledge or experience of, I seemingly keep being drawn back to the themes that resonate so clearly with my own practice. In my previous blog post for the OKHE unit I reflected on my own experience of and engagement with OER. Whilst reading the posts of other participants I was struck with how similar our experiences were and that the issues we face are so alike.
Linda Irish’s post detailed her own struggles, as somebody working within TEL, to encourage the use of OER within the Humanities. Both of our posts highlighted the difficulties that can arise when attempting to modify OER to meet a particular need. As Linda noted ‘finding a suitable resource and then deciding what to do with it and whether it will actually achieve your intended outcome could well take as long as starting from scratch’. This situation appears not to be uncommon. Another post, by Sam Hemsley, also struck a chord with my own experience. Sam described her involvement in the development and delivery of an online programme much of which is comprised of resources which ‘are arguably ripe for sharing’. Again, this post echoed themes I had touched upon, namely the justification of making resources that a select group have paid to access freely available.
Reading both Linda and Sam’s posts, and through revisiting and reflecting upon my initial post, I was inspired to further explore the topic of OER and attempt to gain a better insight into the perceived barriers to their adoption and creation. I was also keen to compare and contrast the current position of OER with that of other areas of openness within Higher Education such as open access to research output.
Let us first go back in time
In his book ‘The Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory’ Martin Weller highlights the similarities between OER and their close ancestors learning objects. On the surface both OER and learning objects before them appear to make perfect sense — resources that can be reused by a large number of people. Why create something if somebody has already done so and furthermore have made it available to others to employ freely? This approach, on the whole, should provide considerable monetary and time savings.
The short story is that, despite the predicted practical and economic benefits of developing and disseminating learning objects, their development and use never really took off. Weller identified three factors that contributed to the demise of learning objects; reusability, standardisation and culture.
David Wiley’s research into the effectiveness of learning objects resulted in his proposal of ‘the reusability paradox’. His work highlighted that by attempting to standardise learning objects so that their (re)use could be as great as possible you actually reduce their pedagogical value.
The requirement to make learning objects discoverable at that time meant that taxonomies had to be developed and then adhered to by academics wishing to share them effectively. This work was simply too cumbersome.
From a cultural perspective the creation of learning objects carried little in career value to academics, who are often time-poor, in comparison to say publishing research papers.
Revisiting the concept of learning objects is worthwhile when attempting to get a sense of the current landscape with regards to OER.
What actually constitutes OER?
Amber Thomas suggests terminology may be playing a role in holding back the adoption and growth of OER. The term Open Educational Resources and its accompanying acronym appear to be poorly understood by many in and around the academic community. Thomas posits that the terms ‘open content’ and ‘open practice’ are better alternatives and playfully adds ‘OER is dead. Long live academically-created content appropriately licensed and formatted to support intended users’.
I found Martin Weller’s reworking of Hoyle’s definition of big and little OER to be an excellent way of viewing things. In simple terms big OER could be described as formal; outputs from institutional level projects which have attached to them prescribed learning outcomes often created through a fair amount of expense and which reside within organised repositories. Little OER could be seen as informal; created by individuals without prescribed outcomes. Informal OER could reside within online systems such as YouTube (video), Flickr (images) and Slideshare (presentations).
This definition of big (formal) and little (informal) OER really appeals to me. Not just for its simplicity but for what could be described as its accessibility. I touched on what actually constitutes OER in my previous blog post, as did Linda Irish in her post, and asked the question of whether YouTube videos or Flickr images could be regarded as OER. Weller and Hoyle’s definition of big and little OER leads me to believe that they are and hints at the perceived low uptake of OER simply being down to overcomplicating what they actually are. The notion of big and little OER is also attractive to me because in many ways it validates much of my professional practice. I make use of resources such as YouTube videos and Flickr images all of time (appropriately licensed of course) but was unsure if they could be regarded as OER. This was something that I contemplated during the writing of my previous blog post for the OKHE unit.
If we move forward accepting that OER doesn’t have to be large scale and formal, and can be something as simple as a YouTube video, then the issue of standardisation, which was a key contributor to the downfall of learning objects is, as Martin Weller notes, virtually eradicated. The ability to share and tag resources using online systems, many of which emerged during what has been termed as web 2.0 in the early 2000s, removes the requirement for prescribed taxonomies. Folksonomies, user generated taxonomies, have now become the accepted method for the classification of digital resources across much of the social web.
The emergence of open licensing such as Creative Commons has virtually negated the issue of reusability that hampered learning objects. David Wiley’s 5Rs of Openness: retain, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute, which are regarded as cornerstones in the OER movement, can only be achieved through the open licensing of resources.
Although the former obstacles of standardisation and reusability now seem to have been overcome, I believe that the remaining issue which so hampered learning objects; culture, still looms large as problematic for the adoption of formal (or big) OER.
Cultural issues and OER
Jisc (or the Joint Information Systems Committee as they were then known) provided information on overcoming barriers and finding enablers to the adoption of OER. This information included the following passage which I think is a good starting point when considering the cultural issues restricting the use of formal OER:
‘The biggest barriers to sharing are factors not directly related to OER, such as the increasingly commercial nature of education, the workload pressures on teaching staff, the increasing ratio of staff to students, and the lack of professional incentives in the sector for teachers to share their work.’
Sam Hemsley’s previous post made reference to the marketisation of Higher Education and how this potentially limits what resources could be made available as OER. This is an interesting issue as, on the one hand, Higher Education institutions are being encouraged to open up access to their information (such as open access to research output) and engage with the public more generally through outreach initiatives whilst on the other hand they are continually being compared with and rated against other institutions through the creation of league tables. This inevitably leads to competition and can lead to individuals, or even entire institutions, becoming more reluctant to share assets that could be deemed to be of value to their reputations.
Workload pressures and rising student numbers can be grouped together under the issue of lack of time. In her previous post Linda Irish stated that ‘time is the most limited commodity academic staff cite when it comes to developing elearning material’. There is no simple solution to this issue although it could be argued that finding even a small amount of time to engage with little (or informal) OER could in turn save them time going forward.
The lack of professional incentives for academics to engage with OER is also a key issue. As mentioned earlier, the REF now requires research output to be made available via open access routes for it to be considered for inclusion. This is a clear incentive for academics to engage with openness. The forthcoming Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) makes no explicit reference to a requirement for institutions to make their educational resources openly available. As a result some academics may simply ignore the idea of OER. One other historical cultural issue is that of the perceived value by institutions of both research and teaching. Indeed, the TEF is viewed by many as a means of redressing the balance in the relationship between, and associated career rewards of, research and teaching activities. Could a greater recognition of teaching be a catalyst for the growth of open resources?
The concept of control over resources is also an issue that could be regarded as cultural. Chris Millson articulated his belief around OER in that sharing them involves ‘surrendering more of your control’ over the resources as this can lead to an increased value of the resource for those wishing to utilise them. Personally, I agree with this statement. Some from the academic community may not. I came across an interesting example cited by Richard Landers in his blog post ‘Why fully open educational resources terrify me’. He declares his biggest fear of making his resources available as OER as being loss of control. This could be dismissed as him simply not wanting to share but he articulates his point well in that he describes how he cannot control how the resources attributed to him could be employed by others in the future.
‘What would stop a University of Walmart from taking my content on unfair treatment of employees in the workplace, replacing a few slides, using it to train its employees on why Walmart is the most fair and equitable employer around, and claiming the ideas were originally mine?’
Having something you created reworked to potentially support something which you actually oppose is quite an unsettling thought. This is an interesting point and even with licensing such as Creative Commons it would be impossible to stipulate exactly what use he would deem to be appropriate. Essentially, by embracing openness Landers fears that, through no fault of his own, his reputation could be negatively affected.
Engagement with OER
Now that we’ve split OER into big (formal) and little (informal) is there really still an issue with engagement? I suppose it depends on where you’re standing. If you’re a funder of formal OER initiatives then clearly usage matters. If you’re a sole academic uploading presentations to, and downloading them from, Slideshare then you’re far less likely to be concerned with usage statistics from large scale OER repositories.
In 2011, Marion Manton and David White produced the Value of Reuse Report relating to the use of OER in Higher Education. Within their report they offered up an analogy of OER use as that of an iceberg symbolising that visible use of OER appears above the waterline but that the vast majority of use is underwater and therefore invisible.
Although the iceberg analogy (2011) was devised prior to Weller and Hoyle’s ideas on big and little OER (2012), I think it does a good job of illustrating what I think is actually happening with regards to the use of open resources. In fact, the labels used in their illustration of their analogy would appear to support this. The visible use of OER is labelled as ‘visible reuse and production of licensed OER’, licensed being the key word and a characteristic of formal (or big) OER. The invisible use is labelled as ‘staff and students use of digital resources in and around the curriculum’. Notice that there is no mention of licenses or even the term OER? Instead they opted for the term ‘digital resources’.
How reliable or useful are OER usage statistics anyway?
How useful are the statistics that can be gathered from the various repositories that house formal OER? To answer this we first have to consider what it is that we are measuring; reach or impact. The number of times that a resource has been downloaded or linked to isn’t the same as the number of times the same resource was (a) actually used and more importantly (b) supported learning. David Wiley’s toothbrush analogy, whereby he compared the provision of free toothbrushes to the provision of OER, questioned the value and effectiveness of formal OER initiatives. His argument was that just because somebody could get something for free didn’t necessarily ensure that it would be effective; in the case of toothbrushes improving oral hygiene, in the case of OERs facilitating learning.
So where does this leave us?
Having explored the area of OER it appears that the term open educational resources is unhelpful. In addition, getting too hung about what does and doesn’t constitute an OER is also detrimental to their potential. As this post has detailed, the technological conditions for the widespread creation and sharing of digital resources are currently good. Nevertheless, cultural issues, such as the conflict between openness and the increasing marketisation of the Higher Education sector and the lack of time for academics to explore the creating and sharing of resources, still remain. As a starting point I would urge academics to familiarise themselves with the fundamentals of open licenses. This will undoubtedly serve them well when looking to source or create resources. Crucially, the culture of sharing educational resources requires participants to move from being simply consumers to prosumers; someone who both produces and consumes. Otherwise eventually the well will run dry.
Exploring the concept of openness in Higher Education has been a rewarding journey for me. The differing views on what openness means could be seen as both a strength (the embracing of a range of perspectives) and a weakness (no definitive message to present to people) of the openness movement. For me, a more fluid, less prescribed description is helpful as it enables people to find their own position within the sphere of openness. In a post explaining why he and his colleagues embraced open access research but rejected MOOCs John Drabinksi stated that ‘openness is nothing like an absolute value. In fact, it is a value that is made good by what it enhances in self and offers to others.’
I can’t argue with that.
