Issues in developing an international movement on Open Educational Resources
27-March-2007
permalink email thisAs promised an update on the Wliiam and Flora Hewlett Foundation Open Educational resources programme.
There are many interesting people here and the informal sessions are pretty good. The conference itself is rather traditional - bit of a shame given that they did get the key documents out in advance - there could have been far less presentations and more time for discussions.
Yesterday i posted a summary of the main report introduced at the conference - a Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities. by Daniel Atkins, John Seely Brown, and Allen Hammond (see also a critical review by Stephen Downes).
Discussions, at least in the informal sessions, have focused on three main issues.
the first is internationalism and the role of the programme with relation to the developing world. In this regard it is unfortunate that the major part of the report on the developing world is contained as an appendix to the main report. But there remains a feeling that the report is talking about how we can export OERs from the economically advanced countries (which sometimes seem to be reduced to the USA) to the developing countries.
There is little or no emphasis on how the OEr movement can support development in the underdeveloped countries, less still on how that content might be shared and valued.
The second is the assumption of the leading role of universities in the OEr movement. whilst talking about wider forms of learning, new pedagogies and different forms of knowledge, especially tacit knowledge, universities are still given the leading role in developing the proposed Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure (OPLI).
And the third 'emergent issue' is the role of people and networks as opposed to technology in facilitating the development, sharing and reuse of OERs. Although the document recognises social objectives as integral the OPLI still seems technologically driven, rather than based on real learning needs.
Nothing new in this - but given the global ambition and social objectives of the Hewlett Foundation they are pretty fundamental issues.
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