Towards openness in 2012

Mexico’s largest University, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), announced in November it will make virtually all its publications, databases, and course materials freely available on the internet over the next few years. This is only one of the many developments in open educational resources of fall 2011. Further UNESCO launched a new OER platform with significant UNESCO publications open for use. And the most remarkable developments probably are the formation of the MITx and the Open Educational University (OERu), that attempt to combine open access to learning materials to institutional accreditation. The idea of sharing gains ground in education. This is a least what I could notice during my follow-up of the educational news and my research for our group work that dealt with the openness of a learning platform (see earlier on this blog).

The philosophy of sharing in education, mostly discussed in terms of Open Educational Resources (OER), allow institutions to use and adapt materials that have been created by other academic staff. The idea of sharing and reusing educational materials is spread for more than 10 years now (OER are celebrating their 10^th anniversary in 2012) by an increasing amount of institutions worldwide. But despite all the good intentions and the great potential of OER, the implementation of the philosophy of OER misses adoption on a large scale (in all countries and in all educational institutions). So, when OER are the future, why are educational institutions moving so slowly in the direction of openness and how can they be encouraged?

Learning is changing, but what about education?

On her blog Catherine Cronin, lecturer and elearning facilitator at the National University of Ireland, is reflecting on the innovation in learning she and her colleagues noticed this year. She concludes: “Boundaries between informal and formal education are blurring. Open, participatory and social media are not just enabling new forms of communication, they are transforming learning.” And indeed, social media play a major role in the innovation in learning, in that sense that they are increasing the transfer of information and open as such opportunities to create and share OER. The increased access to OER promotes the individual and online learning. So, OER are part of the innovation in learning.

The innovative way of learning and the potential of OER have created unique opportunities and challenges for education. According to Catherine educators have to “refer students to excellent, relevant, online open educational resources.” Therefore educators must learn how to “create and share material in new ways, learn to use different tools, and stay abreast of online learning developments.” But the challenge of educational institutions includes also the investment in systematic development of course materials, the time for finding appropriate OER, adapting existing OER, negotiating the copyright licenses, openness to a more learner-centered way of teaching or openness to the use of different materials … And an efficient use of OER also requires critical and technological skills of both teachers and students.

So, while learning seems to change almost ‘naturally’ on the waves of our changing environment and the increasing possibilities of ICT, the adaptation of education requires a lot more investments and seems to discourage educational institutions in their adoption of OER. A response on Catherines blog makes clear that teachers often have difficulties to find and integrate OER: “I sometimes feel so overwhelmed by the exponential growth in tools and apps and other resources”. Another problem in dealing with the innovation of learning and the use of OER is probably the fact that there is no culture of sharing knowledge in education. Based on my own experiences, I notice very often that teachers are not willing to share learning materials they created themselves, in some cases because it took them so much time to create the materials and they don’t want another take advantage of it, or because they are afraid of being judged by others. Further the adaptation to innovative learning faces the difficulty of educators being so attached to their course book, that the use of OER or another approach of the content (a more learner-based) don’t even appear in their mind. Javiera Atenas even goes further and notices “a deep cultural issue in avoiding sharing resources.” He claims there is a” fear of being plagiarised and [a] fear to look as someone that is plagiarising somebody else”, when respectively sharing own resources and using someone else's resources.

Guidelines for higher education

The use of OER in education is more than putting some learning materials on the internet. Taking effective advantage of it requires more investments and changes (in attitudes) in education. To help educational institutions with these challenges UNESCO and COL recently published a set of Guidelines for Open Educational Resources in Higher Education, that give stakeholders in separate sections (government, higher educational institutions, academic staff, student bodies, quality assurance/accreditation bodies) suggestions for efficiently integrating and using OER. With these guidelines UNESCO and COL want to encourage decision makers in governments and institutions to invest in OER. The guidelines are written in a very clear way, explain the advantages of OER (for example “Experiences show that, when institutions make good quality courses and materials publicly available online, they can attract new students, expand their institutional reputation and advance their public service role”) and show for example how government support for openness in education can happen at the policy and guidelines level without any additional funding. Openness clearly brings forth social and economic benefits. So why wouldn’t a government or educational institution implement open policies? It should be nice to see these policies adopted all over the world, and applied in all educational institutions. But, the adoption of the open movement and especially of an efficient use of OER will not just rely on a document of UNESCO and COL. Promotion of the endless possibilities of OER will be needed and therefore I hope that the 10^th anniversary world conference, organized by the UNESCO OER Programme, will be a first step into the direction of a real breakthrough of OER.

Towards openness in 2012?

The culture of open knowledge is growing, the attitude towards sharing is improving significantly, but there is a need to encourage and support governments, educational institutions, … to embrace this culture of openness where intellectual property is important and to consider the opportunities the innovation in learning is offering. The UNESCO-COL-guidelines for the use of OER in higher education and especially a promotion of OER can help to unfold openness on a larger scale and in an efficient way in 2012.