The following is my introductory article to a special issue of Educational Technology magazine on the theme of “Opening Educational Resources” (OER) published last fall. On 1 February 2008 the publisher placed a PDF of this special issue here, where you can download it.

As you will see on the page where the PDF can be downloaded, the magazine is a pillar of the pre-Commons publication era: "Educational Technology Magazine is the world's leading periodical publication covering the entire field of educational technology, an area pioneered by the magazine's editors in the early 1960s. Read by leaders in more than one hundred countries, the magazine has been at the forefront of every important new trend in the development of the field throughout the past five decades."

As my following introductory article describes, the authors in the article are from the top, hands-on leadership of the movement that is opening educational resources online. I think the coming together we are witnessing of open initiatives and education is a crucial event right now. The articles collected in this special issue tell the OER story from the front lines. For each of the authors, I have added a hyperlink to their online activity. The article is copyrighted by Educational Technology magazine and reproduced with permission here.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Opening Educational Resources (download here)

Is OER just another pedagogical theory for learning theorists to debate? Or another techie thing to come along for educators to play with? Not really. Opening educational resources is an action that will cause education to move to a new place. That new place will fundamentally shape learning into the foreseeable future.

The opening of educational resources puts them into a new functional venue that is being called Web 2.0. Wikipedia states: Web 2.0 is a term often applied to a perceived ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users. Ultimately Web 2.0 services are expected to replace desktop computing applications for many purposes. My closing article provides some glimpses of how education resources will be affected by moving on to the Web 2.0 platform - when they get there.

Ten years ago when some of us began opening educational resources into the growing Internet, we did so believing education would benefit from online access to learning materials. We were not intending to move education into a new virtual world, nor aware of any such possibility. By 1999, visionaries at Rice University were conceptualizing open educational object sharing in the project that became Connexions. Soon after the expanding virtual venue entered the new century, MIT was the first major educational institution to commit to large scale opening of its courseware into the Internet. The articles that follow include one from each of those major pioneers and some of the experience of other OER projects both in the United States and around the world. These articles describe key progress and explore issues that have arisen around OER through the first decade of the online opportunity it represents for learning.

Education policy makers, who include most of the readership of this magazine, can help in small ways and large ones to open educational resources. I hope what you read here will instruct and inspire you to become an OER advocate and implementor as are all of us who have written this issue; we did so with you in mind.

Is OER a disruptive educational technology?
The first article is written by Duke law professor and Creative Commons Board of Directors board member James Boyle who spearheads ccLearn, and Ahrash Bissell the ccLearn Executive Director. As the opening of educational resources moves ahead, the new ccLearn will endeavour to offer Creative Commons licensing principles to copyright and creativity protection for materials related to education. As Bissel and Boyle describe in their introductory article, education did not emerge over the past decade as one of the innovative leaders of the new online environment. Education still stands pretty much outside of Web 2.0.

The other two big picture articles were written for this special issue of Educational Technology by the open educational resources leaders from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The Hewlett Foundation is an instrumental funder of OER and the three authors are leading experts on the history, issues and vision for the opening of educational resources that we explore in these articles.

Marshall (Mike) Smith and Phoenix Wang look at key dimensions of a needed flexible, extendable infrastructure that will make it possible for educational resources to be opened into an evolving world wide web. They look at technical, legal, cultural, social, political and research areas – and discuss possible directions for development.

The discussion by Catherine Casserly is far-reaching and insightful by someone who knows as much about the OER experience as anyone. She addresses squarely whether OER is a disruptive educational technology innovation or if it is compatible with traditional norms of education.

OER project descriptions
Following the general OER discussions are three articles by authors who describe the experience of early, established, outstanding examples of open educational resources.

Present since the creation in 1999 of Connexions, C. Sidney Burrus has been a faculty member at Rice University for forty years where he as been engineering department chair and dean. His article describes Connexions OER, where the content is organised in small modules, open to use and reuse in creative ways consistent with modern pedagogy and open to new systems yet to be discovered or invented.

Next, the story of MIT’s inspiration and leadership of OpenCourseWare (OCW) is told by the project’s External Relations Director Stephen Carson. The OCW concept primarily represents publication of existing course materials already in use for teaching purposes - something that the author says could eventually develop into a routine and customary practice in education at all levels, creating a widely accepted culture of open sharing.

In contrast to the first two university based, multi-topic OER projects at Rice and MIT, the work of Sarah and Eric Kansa is a model for the very great deal that can be accomplished by a topic-specific, smaller scale OER endeavour. As the Kansas explain, their Open Context project is the first data repository of its kind, allowing self-publication of research data, community commentary through tagging, and clear citation and stable hyperlinks, and Creative Commons licences that make reusing content legal and easy.

All OER is global
In the Internet world, being open is being global. The three projects discussed in the previous section all receive rich interaction with people across the world. But there are also local factors of fundamental importance to the opening of educational resources. Languages, location relevance, contributing and awareness of opportunity and other issues are considered in the next four articles.

Agnes Chang and Lucifer (Luc) Chu tell the story of the inspiration and creation of a worldwide volunteer network that has translated many thousands of pages of OER digital resources into Chinese. This work has opened significant new educational resources to non-English readers and has demonstrated avid interest in OER from Chinese students and life-long learners.

Based on her work in South Africa, Eve Gray writes about OER in the context of a diverse, multilingual student body, many with Apartheid-inherited deficits in academic preparedness. She questions the appropriateness of a focus on content alone, rather than educational process as it addresses particular contexts, and looks at the need to grow the volumes of Africa-relevant content.

Next Paul G. West of the Commonwealth of Learning describes how 28 small countries have been learning to work together to enhance the professional capacity of educators, to develop new OER course materials and enable the transfer of courses and qualifications across borders. West describes workshops among people sometimes travelling across eight time zones to attend, for benefits including the opportunity to learn about vastly differing countries and how needs and educational approaches differ from one country to another and one region to another.

Writing about the massive global digital resources of the Development Gateway Foundation, Mike Pereira makes the basic point that mainstreaming OER as a public good throughout the developing world could make an enormous contribution. Director of Global Online Communities, Pereira describes the work of the Gateway’s OER portal that provides descriptions and links to a wide range of OER content.

Spotlight on the OER future
The concluding article turns the spotlight on to the open new place which will fundamentally shape learning into the foreseeable future.

Ajit Jaokar’s article is based on a keynote speech he gave at a conference with a title not familiar in education yet: microlearning. His topics are mobile Web 2.0, microlearning, intertwingularity and mobile widgets - all now essential factors in the opening of educational resources.

In my concluding article, I base some predictions about an open education future on nine quotations from books by popular writers about our networked age. When educational resources are opened into the Internet they are affected by network laws that cause effects popularly described as the long tail, the wisdom of crowds and peer production. OER becomes decentralised, tagged, aggregated and miscellaneous. This language is the terminology of the future of learning.

tags: New York United States education open authors educational technology magazine

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