Brief summary of OERs:
OERs (open education resources) are educational resources available online, physically, or otherwise, that are in the public domain and are available for free use by anyone who want to use them. They are intended to be modified, built upon, and/or integrated into curricula, but are also often accessed by individuals without any kind of (non)formal educational structure surrounding the content.
OERs were helped into the mainstream of edtech by David Wiley, who worked to create and legitimize the licensing of the content, namely under the open publication license (OPL). The OPL went on to influence the creation of the Creative Commons license, which is still in use by some OERs such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare program today. Licenses for content exist for the legal protections for ownership of the content, primarily to provide a vector of legal claims for when the producer of some form of content found other people using or profiting from that content without permission. The OPL and similar licenses are unique in that they eschew the restrictive nature of most licenses, and instead allow and encourage people to use the material as they wish, and to proliferate throughout the educational sphere without the red tape that the licensing of content usually entails.
Weller describes OERs as an example of a success story in edtech, as they have managed to stick around and have meaningful impact, although they still have not lived up to their full conceptual potential. OERs such as OpenCourseWare still provide many students, particularly those who cannot access higher education due to issues of cost or proximity, a valuable avenue of education and exploration.
I chose to cover OERs because I am currently making use of one of them, and found Weller’s claims that the impact of OERs were minimal to be contrary to my own personal experiences, and wanted to explore what made Weller make those claims, as well as to expand on and explore my own initial reaction towards OERs. I am using MIT OpenCourseWare’s course on linear algebra taught by Gilbert Strang as a supplemental material to my own course at UVic on the same topic. I have been struggling with the lectures and explanations offered by the professor here at the institution that I am attending, and having an additional angle for the information to be presented has been very helpful. It is also nice to be able to go back and watch the video lectures on OpenCourseWare again, since my professor elects not to keep recordings of his lectures.
With my personal experience, though it is positive, I can imagine how OERs and their focus on content over everything can be unhelpful in many instances. While it is very helpful in mathematics, and likely other STEM topics, in more “fluid” studies like sociology, arts, english, etc, I can see the drawbacks of the lacking in communication with peers and educators that most OERs are missing. In these cases, I can certainly see how the implementation of OERs is subpar, and missing out on the potential of the resource, as Weller articulates in their book. While institutionally backed OERs such as OpenCourseWare, and OER resources such as Khan Academy and TED as Weller mentions may provided beneficial as a resource for students of the more autodidactic variety, its current lack of implementations and integrations by most accredited institutions represents a path forwards for OERs to further expand their influence in the educational sphere, which I believe to be a good thing.
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