Open Educational Resources Briefing Paper

=1. Introduction= Higher education institutions around the world have been using the Internet and other digital technologies to develop and distribute teaching and learning for decades. Recently, Open Educational Resources (OER) have gained increased attention for their potential and promise to obviate demographic, economic, and geographic educational boundaries and to promote life-long learning and personalised learning. The rapid growth of OER provides new opportunities for teaching and learning, at the same time, they challenge established views about teaching and learning practices in higher education.

This briefing paper provides the background to the current development of and future trends around OER aimed at adding to our understanding, stimulating ongoing debate among the JISC community and developing a research agenda. The briefing is structured in three sections:
 * Discussion on the conceptual and contextual issues of Open Educational Resources.
 * A review of current OER initiatives: their scale, approaches, main issues and challenges.
 * Discussion on trends emerging in Open Educational Resources, with respect to future research and activities.

=2. Concept and Context of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement=

2.1 The concept of “Openness” and the Open Initiatives
The concept of ‘Openness’ is based on the idea that knowledge should be disseminated and shared freely through the Internet for the benefit of society as a whole. The two most important aspects of openness are free availability and as few restrictions as possible on the use of the resource, whether technical, legal or price barriers. Openness exists in different forms and domains and has different meanings in different contexts. For example, in the social domain it is fundamentally motivated by the expected social benefits and by ethical considerations related to freedom to use, contribute and share. Openness in the technical domain is characterised by access to source code and/or access to interoperability standards or the standards process. According to Tuomi (2006), a higher level of openness is about the right and ability to modify, repackage and add value to the resource. However, most existing initiatives offer the most basic level of openness - “open” means “without cost” but it does not mean “without conditions”.

The definition of ‘open’ is constantly evolving and varies according to context e.g. sharing software source code, re-(using) content and open access to publications. The following well-known initiatives present important steps toward creating, sharing and reusing open source, learning objectives, research outcomes and encouraging and promoting the use of open licences.
 * Open Source Initiative http://www.opensource.org/: During February 1998, Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens founded OSI, the Open Source Initiative, with the purpose of "managing and promoting the Open Source Definition for the good of the community, specifically through the OSI Certified Open Source Software certification mark and program". It is dedicated to promoting open source software for which the source code is published. This allows anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the code and its modifications without paying royalties or fees. The process is enabled and guaranteed by Open Source Licences which ensure that software licenses that are labelled as "open source" conform to existing community norms and expectations.
 * Open Content Initiative http://www.opencontent.org/. Inspired by the success of Open Sources Initiative (OSI), David Wiley founded “Open Content Project” in 1998 (Wiley 2003) to popularise the principle of OSI for creatiing and reusing learning objectives and content. The first content-specific licence was created for educational materials and a key fundamental of Wiley’s original licence is that any object is freely available for modification, use and redistribution with certain restrictions.
 * Open Access Initiatives http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/about/openaccess.html : The idea of Open Access is that scholarly work should be freely and openly available online with no unnecessary licensing, copyright, or subscription restrictions. Three key initiatives serve as milestones for the open access movement. In December 2001, the Open Society Institute organised a meeting in Budapest and the outcome of this meeting was the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI). The Budapest Initiative announced two strategies for open access – the establishment of open access journals and self-archiving by scholars of their work. In April 2003, a meeting at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Maryland resulted in the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing - free access to scholarly journals. It provided a working definition of open access publishing and agreed a set of principles that all parties (scholars, research institutions, publishers and librarians) could adopt to ‘promote the rapid and efficient transition to open access publishing’. In October of 2003, a conference at the Max Planck Society in Berlin resulted in the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. This states that progress should be made by encouraging researchers to publish their work according to open access principles and cultural institutions to provide their resources on the Internet.
 * Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/ - Creative Commons’ first project, in December 2002, was the release of a set of copyright licences for public use. These machine-readable licenses are designed for websites, scholarship, music, film, photography, literature, courseware, etc and they help people make their creative works available to the public, retain their copyright while licensing them as free for certain uses, on certain conditions. ccLearn, the educational division of Creative Commons, was launched in 2007 and is dedicated to realizing the full potential of the Internet to support open learning. It is expected to further reduce barriers to sharing, remixing and reusing educational resources.

2.2 Defining Open Educational Resources
The term Open Educational Resources (OER) was first introduced at a conference hosted by UNESCO in 2000 and was promoted in the context of providing free access to educational resources on a global scale. There is no authoritatively accredited definition for the term OER at present; the most often used definition of OER is, “digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research” (OECD, 2007). With regard to this working definition, it is important to note that “resources” are not limited to content but comprise three areas, these are (OECD, 2007):
 * Learning content: Full courses, courseware, content modules, learning objects, collections and journals.
 * Tools: Software to support the development, use, reuse and delivery of learning content, including searching and organisation of content, content and learning management systems, content development tools, and online learning communities.
 * Implementation resources: Intellectual property licenses to promote open publishing of materials, design principles of best practice and localise content. (OECD, 2007)

A wide variety of initiatives in higher education have crystallized around the above three areas - from institutions that publish the materials they use in their own teaching (e.g. syllabi, lecture notes, reading lists etc.), to projects that support the creation, provision and sharing of open content through developing software, standards and licensing tools or building communities of use.

2.3 Visions and goals
Although there is no comprehensive definition of OER there are many diverse goals for increased adoption and use of OERs. The Cape Town Open Education Declaration created a vision to promote open education as “Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge…” To realize this vision, three strategies have been proposed in order to increase the reach and impact of open educational resources. These are: The Declaration has already been signed by thousands of individuals and hundreds of organisations, includes learners, educators, trainers, authors, schools, colleges, universities, publishers, unions, professional societies, policymakers, governments, foundations around the world. As the OER movement grows, this idea will continue to evolve. It is necessary to further develop a shared vision and implementation strategies, especially around technology changes and teaching and learning practices.
 * Encourage educators and learners to actively participate in the emerging open education movement. Creating and using open resources should be considered integral to education and should be supported and rewarded accordingly;
 * Open educational resources should be freely shared through open licences which facilitate use, revision, translation, improvement and sharing by anyone. Resources should be published in formats that facilitate both use and editing, and that accommodate a diversity of technical platforms.
 * Governments, school boards, colleges and universities should make open education a high priority. Ideally, taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources. Accreditation and adoption processes should give preference to open educational resources.

2.4 Drivers/enablers, inhibitors
As with any other technology-related initiatives in education, OER is driven by technical, economic, social, policy and legal factors. Some of these factors provide either a favourable environment or a particular handle for bringing about changes and others may hinder a broader uptake of OER initiatives. OLCOS (2007) in OER Roadmap 2012  grouped the drivers/enables and possible inhibitors according to their assumed short to medium (until around 2009) or longer-term influence (until 2012) as the following: Short-medium term (to 2009) Drivers/enablers: Inhibitors: Long-term (to 2012) Drivers/enables Inhibitors According to OLCOS (OLCOS, 2007), The drivers/enablers or inhibitors under the category short- to medium-term should indicate those already have observable influences, and may continue or gradually decline after 2009. However, those under the category longer-term do not mean that it will not have an influence by 2009, rather, the idea is that it will have an influence over a longer period of time, and that this influence may be felt much more strongly after 2009. =3. Review of Open Educational Resources (OER) Initiatives in Higher Education[1]=
 * International organisations’ promotion and funding available
 * Competition among leading institutions in providing free access to educational resources as a way to attract new students
 * Success of open access initiatives and repository projects;
 * Rapid development and wide use of Social Software tools and services and emergence of personal learning environment;
 * Licensing open content will become easier as plug-ins for widely used authoring software packages become available.
 * Growing competition for scarce funding resources
 * Difficulty in finding a balanced approach to open and commercial educational offerings;
 * Copyright issues
 * Fears of low recognition for OA publications, particularly among young researchers
 * Lack of policies for the development and use of repository at institutional level
 * Lack of communication and cooperation between system and tool developers and educators;
 * Policies emphasise educational innovation and organisational change in educational institutions
 * ICT-based lifelong learning and personalised learning needs
 * Opportunities for co-operation and collaboration between institutions around the world
 * Global competition in Higher Education and decline in student numbers in Europe due to demographic trends;
 * Creative Commons licensing is firmly established and is being used increasingly.
 * New systems for creating and handling group-based Learning Designs may become more widely used;
 * Semantic applications will provide new ways to access knowledge resources.
 * Business models in OER will remain tricky
 * Lack of institutional policies and incentives for educators to excel in OER
 * Models that build on teachers in the creation and sharing of OER will need to invest considerable effort in training and support;
 * Creation of educational metadata will remain costly
 * Need more advanced tools and services for educational repository;

3.1 Mapping OER and Featured OER Initiatives
Open Educational Resources (OER) initiatives aspire to provide open access to high-quality education resources on a global scale. From large institution-based or institution-supported initiatives to numerous small-scale activities, the number of OER related programmes and projects have been growing fast within the past few years. According to OECD (OECD, 2007), there are more than 3000 open access courses (opencourseware) currently available from over 300 universities worldwide. The following are several well-known programmes and projects which illustrate different approaches, models and scales of current OER initiatives:
 * In the United States thousands courses have been made available by university-based projects, such as MIT OpenCourseWare, Rice University’s Connexions project etc. (http://ocw.mit.edu/, http://cnx.rice.edu/)
 * In China, 750 courses have been made available by 222 university members of the China Open Resources for Education (CORE) consortium. (http://www.core.org.cn/cn/jpkc/index_en.html)
 * In Japan, more than 400 courses have been made available by 19 member universities of the Japanese OCW Consortium from its 19 member universities. (http://www.jocw.jp/)
 * In France, 800 educational resources from around 100 teaching units have been made available by 11 member universities of the ParisTech OCW project. (http://graduateschool.paristech.org/)
 * MIT OpenCourseWare (http://ocw.mit.edu) – the best-known example of OpenCourseWare sharing and the most copied institutional OER model - the publication on the Web of course materials used in MIT classroom teaching. MIT OCW aims to provide a snapshot of how a particular course is taught at a particular time. It offers lecture notes, problem sets, syllabi, reading lists, tools and simulations as well as video and audio lectures. Approximately 1,800 courses are made available to educators and learners worldwide at no cost, so that they can draw on the materials for their own teaching and learning, use them as a curriculum and course planning tool, or as inspiration for their own open content initiatives.


 * OpenLearn initiative (http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/) – launched by the UK Open University to make a selection of their materials available worldwide for free use by anyone accessing the site and to build communities of learners and educators around the content using a range of tools and strategies. The OpenLearn initiative complements the MIT by providing not only a collection of free course material but also a set of tools to help authors publish and support collaborative learning communities. It is organised in two ways: the LearningSpace which offers 5400 learning hours of materials for learning and a LabSpace where content can be downloaded, re-mixed, adapted and reused.


 * USU OCW (http://ocw.usu.edu/) - Utah State University offers a collection of open educational resources used in their formal campus courses for faculty, students, and self-learners throughout Utah and around the world. The USU OCW also provides self - learners a variety of "credit by examination" options so that they can obtain college credit for what they have learned through using USU OpenCourseWare. The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (http://cosl.usu.edu/) at Utah State University has developed an OCW development tool – eduCommons. It allows institutions to easily publish OCW content via a ready-made platform designed for efficient production of course materials. This model is also intended to provide an institution with the means to assure academic and pedagogical quality via two different digital course resource systems within a university: one built entirely of creative commons material, and another built within the IP environment of the institution’s digital library/repository allowing access to copyright material only to authenticated members of the community. Open source software also designed by the centre to support learner communities using OCW and to provide educational support services.


 * Connexions (http://cnx.org/) – initially funded by Rice University, the Connexions attempts to bring the three strands of content, communities and software together in one intuitive and dynamic teaching and learning environment. It provides not only a rapidly growing collection of free scholarly material but also a set of free software tools to help authors publish and collaborate; instructors build rapidly and share custom courses; and learners explore the links among concepts, courses and disciplines. The Programme focuses on building and supporting communities of digital object consumers and producers who credential material. Rice’s Connexions project currently hosts 3,461 open learning objects available for mixing and matching into study units or full courses.

A variety of OER programmes and projects have been started in recent years. It is not possible to give a comprehensive estimation of the number of ongoing OER initiatives at the moment. However, it is possible to distinguish between different models of OER s that exist side by side, creating a kind of ecosystem to meet a variety of needs of teaching and learning in higher education.
 * Open Learning Initiative (http://www.cmu.edu/oli/ ) started at Carnegie Mellon University. It was launched in the hope that online learning environments might constitute an alternative to traditional classroom teaching by promoting greater student-content interaction and by providing students with greater and more frequent feedback on their performance and understanding. The design of OLI courses has been guided by cognitive principles of learning that stress the importance of interactive environments, feedback on student understanding and performance, authentic problem-solving and efficient computer interface. OLI’s complete courses have innovative features such as intelligent tutoring systems, virtual laboratories, group experiments and simulations and frequent opportunities for assessment and feedback. OLI is also about building a community that will play an important role in course development and improvement, which is fundamental to the future direction of open educational practice.
 * MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching, http://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm) - has been developed by the California State University Centre for Distributed Learning. The MERLOT model also attempts to engage the user community in shaping the open content to apply to varied educational objectives. It is a user-centred, searchable collection of peer reviewed and selected higher education, online learning materials, catalogued by registered members and a set of faculty development support services. It has 15 discipline communities, two partner communities and one workforce community. All discipline communities have an editorial board for peer review. MERLOT uses community-building techniques and looks to original contributors, peer reviewers and the user community to keep online catalogues updated, fresh and vibrant. It contains links to more than 15,500 resources, which encompass simulations, animations, tutorials, drills and practices, quizzes and tests as well as lectures, case studies, collections, reference materials and podcasts.
 * OpenCourseWare Consortium (http://www.ocwconsortium.org/) - a collaboration of more than 100 higher education institutions and associated organisations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model. Member institutions must commit to publishing, under the institution's name, materials from at least ten courses in a format that meets the agreed definition of opencourseware. OpenCourseWare Consortium’s model encourages institutions to be involved in some kind of established co-operation for sharing resources with others and to develop a common evaluation framework for all consortium members.

3.2 Models for Open Educational Resources
Funding models from Downes (2006)

There are many funding models currently used by an open educational resource initiative. Downes (2006) summarised these models as follows: Conversion Model- by given something away for free and then convert the consumer of the freebie to a paying customer. This model has proven popular in the educational community, having been adopted by Elgg and LAMS. Because OER initiatives have different goals and exist in different institutional contexts, no single funding model fit every project.
 * Endowment Model – the project obtains base funding and a fund administrator manages this base funding and the project is sustained from interest earned on that fund. For example, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where funds were raised from a variety of charitable foundations, generating in interest the service’s operating budget.
 * Membership Model – a coalition of interested organizations is invited to contribute a certain sum, either as seed only or as an annual contribution or subscription; this fund generates operating revenues for the OEM service. For example, the Sakai Educational Partners Program, is a for-fee community that is open to educational institutions.
 * Donations Model – a project deemed worthy of support by the wider community requests, and receives donations. Numerous open source and open content projects are funded in this manner, including Wikipedia and the Apache Foundation. Donations can take the form of money or content / code.
 * Contributor-Pay Model – a mechanism that contributors pay for the cost of maintaining the contribution, and the provider thereafter makes the contribution available for free. For Example, the PLoS Open Access, research articles and supporting documentation will be made freely available online to view immediately upon publication. The charges for this process will be met by funding bodies.
 * Sponsorship Model – this model underlies a form of open access that is available in most homes: free radio and television. In online educational initiatives, various companies have supported OER projects on a more or less explicit sponsorship basis, often in partnership with educational institutions. Examples include the MIT iCampus Outreach Initiative and the Stanford on iTunes project.
 * Institutional Model - an institution will assume the responsibility itself for an OER initiative and the most well known of these is MIT’s OpenCourseWare project.
 * Governmental Model – funding for OER projects are directly come from government agencies, including the United Nations.

Different OER Models in Higher Education (Wiley, 2006)

Wiley (2006) summarised three models for open educational resource projects in higher education: the MIT model, the USU model, and the Rice model. These three models exhibit an instructive diversity in their size, organization, and provision of IP-clearance, content creation, and other services.
 * The MIT Model: this model is highly centralized and tightly coordinated in terms of organization and the provision of services, relying almost exclusively on paid employees. The goal of MIT OCW is to publish each and every course in the entire 1,800-course university catalogue in a fixed period of time, and to continually republish new versions of courses and archive older versions. MIT has made an institutional commitment to sustain the project over the long term. One the key drivers and enabler for the MIT project has been the lever of Foundation and private donor support it has been able to achieve. It has also successfully engaged vendors (such as Sapient, Microsoft, Maxtor, Hewlett-Packard, Akamai, and NetRaker) in partnerships. The annual budgets for MIT OCW projected from 2007 through 2011  are over £ 2,155,000 per year, with the most resources allocated to staff (including eight core staff, five publication managers, four production team members, two intellectual property researchers, and ten department liaisons) technology and contracted services. Without significant external funding, it is unlikely that any other institution will be able to replicate the MIT model.
 * The USU Model: This model is a hybrid of centralization and decentralization of both organization and services, and work is distributed across some employed staff and a number of volunteers. The goal of USU is to publish as many of the courses in the USU course catalogue as possible. Faculty members volunteer to coordinate this work as part of their teaching or advising responsibilities by making USU OCW-related work eligible for credit in their courses. The USU has also acquired the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation support with more than £125, 300 over the life of the project. The annual projected budget for USU OCW in 2007 is just over £63,647 (including one full-time Director, two half-time graduate students, and three half-time undergraduates). It is likely that this model could be replicable by other universities.
 * The Rice Model: This model is almost fully decentralized and volunteers provide almost all services and materials. The goal of Rice Connexions is to enable the collaborative development of educational modules and courses by authors from around the world. There is no target number of courses to be developed and the courses and modules in Connexions are not all from courses taught at the Rice University. There is extensive documentation provided on the site to provide guidance for course building, technical and pedagogical support and to help authors deal with copy right issues. The average cost per course under the Connexions model appears to be extremely low. Most importantly, this model provides an example of volunteer-driven open resource communities that many other institutions could adopt and further explore.

The MIT, USU, and Rice models show much of the diversity possible in open educational resource initiatives in higher education from institutional course based to more community based bottom-up activities. There are also all kinds of in-between models forming a continuum. For any OER initiative there is no one-size-fits-all model. However the existing models provide a good basis for others to build on.

3.3 Motives for Providing, Producing and Using OER
The first and most fundamental question anyone arguing for free and open sharing of educational resources has to answer is – Why should anyone give away anything for free? What are the possible gains in doing that? The OECD (2007) conducted case studies at institutions with OER projects and a number of reasons for using and producing OER were presented. These are summarised as follows: From a more individual standpoint, open sharing is claimed to increase publicity, reputation and the pleasure of sharing with peers. According to OECD’s study (OECD, 2007), the motives for individuals to become engaged in OER can grouped into four: Findings from the OECD research suggest that, the most commonly reported motive for lecturers was to gain access to the best possible resources and to have more flexible materials. It should also be emphasised that a combination of several of the motives listed here are likely to be in play simultaneously, both altruistic motives and economic incentives.
 * The altruistic argument that sharing knowledge is in line with academic traditions and a good thing to do.
 * Educational institutions should leverage taxpayers’ money by allowing free sharing and reuse of resources.
 * Quality can be improved and the cost of content development reduced by sharing and reusing.
 * It is good for the institution’s public relations to have an OER project as a showcase for attracting new students.
 * There is a need to look for new cost recovery models as institutions experience growing competition.
 * Open sharing will speed up the development of new learning resources, stimulate internal improvement, innovation and reuse and help the institution to keep good records of materials and their internal and external use.
 * The altruistic motivation of sharing (as for institutions), which again is supported by traditional academic values.
 * Personal non-monetary gain, such as publicity, reputation within the open community (egoboost).
 * Free sharing can be good for economic or commercial reasons, as a way of getting publicity, reaching the market more quickly, gaining the first-mover advantage, etc.
 * Sometimes it is not worth the effort to keep the resource closed. If it can be of value to other people one might just as well share it for free.

3.4 Outcomes and Some Lessons Learned
Although there is little qualitative or quantitative research data available for OER initiatives at the moment, some positive outcomes and impacts from individual projects have been reported. For example, MIT OpenCourseWare’s evaluation report (MIT OpenCourseWare, 2006) indicates that MIT OCW has been visited more than 8.5 million in 2005, a 56% annual increase. MIT OCW use is centred on subjects which MIT is a recognised field leader. The data shows that 61% of OCW traffic is non-US, 49% of visitor identify themselves as self learners, 32% students and 16% educators. Educators come to the site primarily to develop a course (26%), prepare to teach a specific class (22%), and to enhance personal knowledge (19%). Student uses the website to complemente a course (38%), enhance personal knowledge (34%) and plan course of study (16%); Self learner uses it to enhance personal knowledge (56%), keep current in field (16%) and plan future study (14%). Similarly, Connexions is being used in traditional colleges, community colleges and primary and secondary school settings, in distance learning and by lifelong learners around the globe (UNESCO, 2005). Volunteers are translating modules and courses into a range of different languages, including Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and Thai. Some key lessons learned from these OER projects include:

Culture issues and localisation: OER projects are cultural as much as they are educational, in that they give users “an insight into culture-specific methods and approaches to teaching and learning” – a practical exposure to the way that courses are ‘done’ in another country or by another instructor. The conditions under which OER are created, the languages used and the teaching methodologies employed result in products that are grounded in and specific to the culture and educational norms of their developers. Localising OER material is not only a question of language but also one of culture. It is important to be aware of cultural and pedagogical differences between the original context of use and the intended new use of the material. Incentives for faculty members: The greatest concern is the time that is required from academics to prepare elements of a course that will be available, monitored, maintained, updated and perhaps re-formulated for new settings and different uses. With little or no institutional or peer recognition or encouragement, there is little incentive for faculty members to take on the extra burden of developing and refining OER content. The creation of OER should be viewed not as an additional burden but rather as an integrated part of the scholarly endeavour that is useful, first and foremost, to a faculty member’s own teaching, scholarship and career.

User support and experience: There is little data and research available on the user experience with OER. Systematic research of user behaviours and use patterns would help the field develop better tools to support use and reuse the content. For example, OERs are designed specifically for reusing teaching materials and self – learning, it is important that user support systems should be built into the resources themselves and develop self-supporting online user communities. The OpenLearn project is beginning to collate findings in this area.

3.5 Major Challenges
OER programmes and projects have generated considerable enthusiasm from governments, funding bodies, institutions, organisations and individuals. The spread of Open Educational Resources creates substantial educational opportunities, but also reveals challenges that require further work in order to reach their full potential.

Sustainability As with any fixed-term, externally funded initiative, the maintenance and sustainability of OER is becoming a significant challenge. According to Wiley (2006), the sustainability of OER initiatives must be considered in two parts: the sustainable production of OER and the sustainable sharing of resources. The sustainability of any OER initiative is influenced by the size of the operation (small or large), the type of provider (institution or community) and the level of integration of users in the production process (co-production or producer-consumer model). There are many funding models in the different institutional contexts, however, every initiative will have different goals so no single model will fit every project. Atkins (2007) has identified a number of approaches to sustainability which should be considered and need to be explored: There is growing interest in community-based approaches to produce content and promote sharing and use of resources. To make OER initiatives work and keep them for the long run, it is important to first gain and maintain a critical mass of active, engaged users, increase usability and improve quality of the resources created. The “community” offers possibilities for rapid diffusion and a strong community influences user behaviour and increases the likelihood that users will come back to the repository. OER should not only pay attention to the “product” but on understanding what its user community wants and on improving the OER’s value for various user communities.
 * Encourage institutions, rather than just individual pioneer-faculty, to buy into the OER movement so that institutional resources will be committed to sustain it.
 * Situate OER collections not as distinct from the courseware environment for the formally enrolled students but as a low marginal cost derivative of the routinely used course preparation and management systems.
 * Encourage membership-based consortia to share cost and expertise.
 * Explore roles for students in creating, enhancing and adopting OER.
 * Consider a voluntary (or mix of voluntary and paid) wiki-like model, in which OER is the object of micro-contributions from many.
 * Examine ways that social software can be used to capture and structure user commentaries on the material.

Intellectual Property and Copyright Issues

Intellectual property issues are at the heart of OER. It was suggested that the issue of copyright and ownership of material is “the root cause of slow development in this field,” inhibiting some faculty members and institutions from making more educational content available to the online community. Before publishing educational resources that make use of third-party materials on the Internet, the author, or the publisher, must ensure they have the right to use these materials. There are several barriers raised by copyright to the use and production of open educational resources as follows (OECD, 2007): To help address issues such as this and many more, the Creative Commons has launched a new division - Learning Commons, which focuses specifically on education. The mission of Learning Commons is to break down the legal, technical, and cultural barriers to a global educational commons. Learning Commons will provide advice and expertise to the OER community to overcome technical and cultural obstacles and identify lessons learned.
 * Practical difficulties for obtaining rights, such as whether a licenses is applicable or not, sometimes requires sophisticated legal analysis; it is not always easy to locate the appropriate license holder, which can be very expensive for the OER initiative. The difficulties and costs related to rights clearance for use of third-party content are considerable, in some cases almost half of the cost of the whole initiative.
 * The issue of unintended incompatibility between materials or tools licensed under different licenses, or different versions of the same licenses, is becoming a key issue. Like technical interoperability, increased legal interoperability is of fundamental importance for the growth of the OER movement.
 * Low awareness among teachers and researchers producing learning resources of permit controlled sharing, with some rights reserved to the author. Although many academics are willing to share their work, they often hesitate to do so in this new environment for fear of losing their rights to their work. The opposite of retaining copyright is to release work into the public domain, in which case the author retains no rights and anyone can use the material in any way and for any purpose.

Quality Assessment and Enhancement The rapidly growing number of learning materials and repositories makes the issue of how to find the resources that are most relevant and of best quality a pressing one. There are several alternative ways of approaching quality management issues which have been used: The quality of Open Educational resources can be improved through a centrally designed or decentralised process and the process may be open or closed. All these approaches can be used separately or dominated, depending on which kind of OER initiative or programme is being considered. Interoperability The concept of OER builds heavily on the idea of reusing and repurposing materials created somewhere else by someone else. Therefore, interoperability is a key issue. Learning resources need to be searchable across repositories, and it must be possible to download, integrate and adapt them across platforms. The lack of good faith implementations of interoperability standards in VLEs means that many resources produced by one educational institution will not be able to be exported or imported easily into other systems. Open standards foster interoperability, allowing disparate devices, applications and networks to communicate. A number of standards and specifications including IMS and SCORM, have been developed to enable interoperability, accessibility and reusability of web-based learning content While these specifications help achieve re-use of content, they are not intended to help modification of content. For that aspect, the use of standardised content formats such as DocBook, TEI or DITA could be of value. Simple and well structured HTML could be particularly useful for this purpose, particularly because an increasing number of user friendly tools such as wikis allow educators to edit content directly. =4.OER - Calls for research, actions and the future= Higher education institutions worldwide face significant challenges related to providing increased access, while containing or reducing costs. Meeting increasing and increasingly varied demand for quality higher education is an important consideration in the policy debate and institutional development in many countries. OER is itself one of these challenges, but may also be a sound strategy for individual institutions to meet them. Inevitably, in a few years, OER could be replaced by new initiatives, even though, what is being done today or is trying to be done for the OER could be a guidepost for future initiatives towards the goal of enhancing life-long learning and personalised learning in the information society.
 * Institution-based approach: this is to use the brand or reputation of the institution to persuade the user that the materials on the website are of good quality, such as the OCW initiatives and UK Open University’s OpenLearn initiative. Institutions most probably use internal quality checks before they release the courses, but these processes are not open in the sense that users of the resources can follow them. The major challenge here is how the use of open educational material might constantly improve the material through reflected use.
 * Peer review approach: This is one of the most used quality assurance processes in academia. As well as being well-known and well-used in Open source software projects (to review the code delivered by community members) and Open access journals (to decide which articles should be published), it could also be used for OER to guarantee the quality of a repository’s resources. It is necessary to make review decisions credible, and peer review according to agreed criteria is well suited to that purpose.
 * Open Users Review Approach: This is a kind of low-level or bottom-up approach, letting individual users decide on whatever grounds they like whether a learning resource is of high quality, useful or good in any other respect. This can be done by having users rate or comment on the resource or describe how they have used it, or by showing the number of downloads for each resource on the website, such as Rice University’s Connexions project.

4.1 Policy concerns
There are a variety of policies that can enable or hinder the work of open educational resource projects. It is therefore necessary that governments and institutions should review and develop policies that foster openness and access. Polices should be adopted that enable or encourage in the creation, sharing and provision of educational resources. The policy issues raised by OER are interlinked with general organisational, cultural and pedagogical issues within an institution. It is generally agreed that OER is primarily an institutional innovation, not a technical one. However, institutions do need to have a well-reasoned ICT strategy and clear e-learning policies in order to adequately deal with the opportunities (and threats) posed by the OER movement. There will be the need for many more institutional innovations in order to promote a culture of sharing and re-using content within the institution. The following areas should be addressed:
 * Curriculum development
 * Financial support
 * Intellectual property
 * Culture of sharing
 * Assessment and accreditation
 * Quality assurance
 * Staff development
 * Student support
 * Technical infrastructure/software
 * Institutional model

4.2 Social, culture and pedagogical concerns
From a social and pedagogical perspective OER could support lifelong learning and personalised learning, therefore, it is important to explore how learning takes place within the framework of OER. It was predicted that the emergence of personal learning environments will move the power over learning from the institutions, to individual learners. Learning is a social process based on ongoing communication, exchange of ideas and opinions and the reconsideration and reworking of study results. In this context, teaching and learning material is not necessarily created by one teacher or even by a teacher at all; learners should be actively involved in the process of designing curricula and syllabi and in the creation of knowledge. The development of using OER implies support for an open curriculum where learners have the flexibility to select a range of individual units/courses to suit their personal needs for the development of expertise. An increase in non-formal and informal learning can be expected to enhance the demand for assessment and recognition of competences gained outside formal learning settings. If so, issues of recognition and accreditation will be of growing importance. This may need a competency-based educational framework. An alternative way to provide evidence of learners’ achievement is to create an “assessment on demand” option where students have free access to OCW, free access to volunteer tutors and gain credit on-demand from providing institutions (for example, USU OCW' s "credit by examination" option for self-learners). Credits earned in this way from various institutions would be aggregated by a new mechanism that would award accredited degrees and could leverage online learning using OER.

Community building is becoming an important theme in open educational resource initiatives. In fact, the notion of Community of Practice implies that members of such communities, who are interested in certain subjects and opportunities for collaborative teaching practice and learning activities, want to further develop an understanding of certain issues and resources such as tools and content. Therefore, embedding the development of content in a community of practice is a key way to ensure that OER are relevant to the practice of learning and teaching. Simply providing access to databases of content will not encourage communities to become involved in the OER movement. Giving recognition and support to existing communities of users at the right time could provide the most powerful intervention in terms of sustainability of any OER funded initiative. Many useful tools and services are available which could make it easier to set up and support such learning communities. The exisiting community-driven nature of the OER movement is evidence of possibilities for transformation towards a new culture of learning.

4.3 Technical concerns
A new education paradigm will appear only when social, organisational and cultural issues are resolved in tandem with creating technology-based services. Core to technical innovations in OER is the need to simplify the user experience across the entire range of OER activities, from access to use to reuse and creation. Therefore, it is important to provide flexible, extendable platforms and easily adaptable open tools to access, use, reuse, create and post content to the Web. For that reason, much of the OER motive is about evolving infrastructure for enhanced content creation and use of infrastructure for accessing digital content. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation proposes an Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure (OPLI) which comprise a set of organisational practices, technical infrastructure, and social norms that collectively provide for the smooth operation of high-quality open learning in distributed, distance-independent ways. The proposed OPLI seeks to enable a decentralised learning environment that: An OPLI platform should include at least three types of activities: Infrastructure building is a dynamic process; from technology–based services, various systems merge to allow dissimilar systems to be linked into networks. In this process, standardisation and inter-organisational communication techniques are critical. It is important to devise a compatible infrastructure so that there is ready transferability between the system provider, content creator and the user. Through the development of a service oriented infrastructure in parallel with other tools and resources so that lectures and learners can participate, contribute and share thoughts, resources and experiences. The new set of low-barrier and easy-to-use social software tools and service which promote connections, exchanges and collaboration among people who share common goals and interests provide opportunities for OER innovation. For example, the widespread use of blogs, wikis, various mashups, podcasting and mobile devices among other emerging technologies beyond the educational sector has attracted the interest of many educators who are striving to innovate educational practices. Web-savvy students are already integrating such tools and services to run personal environments for study as well as various social activities. The growing social learning toolset lends itself to inventiveness among its users -involving a do-it-yourself (DIY) spirit. It is important to keep track of the developments of social software tools and how they could complement OER innovations.
 * permits distributed participatory learning;
 * provides incentives for participation (provision of open resources, creating specific learning environments and evaluation) at all levels; and
 * encourages cross-boundary and cross cultural learning.
 * creating and providing infrastructure;
 * meaningful and transformative use of the infrastructure; and
 * discovery and transfer of the fruits of relevant research into future generations of the infrastructure.

5. Conclusion and Further Discussion
Although there are a growing number of OER initiatives and more and more institutions and individuals are sharing their digital learning resources over the Internet freely and openly, many fundamental questions still remain. Not least of which are the drivers for people, institutions and funding bodies. There is a need for further discussions and a deeper exploration of a number of issues in this context: How institutions could be best supported in accelerating the organisational and cultural changes that are both needed and may be inevitable if OER approaches are to become embedded. How should institutions take account of the implications of OER for learning and teaching and new methods of assessment and accreditation in particular? Building and enhancing existing communities appears central to the development of the educational paradigm of the open content movement. Developing open and sustainable communities of practice should be central to any OER funding model. These communities should not develop in isolation from existing communities rather they should enhance and build on established, effective networks. The successful management of this process is a key challenge.

Copyright and IPR issues continue to dominate any projects creating and re-using content. Institutions should be encouraged to develop policies which encourage staff (and students) to make their teaching and learning content discoverable, sharable, portable and re-usable. As discussed earlier in this paper, there are a number of established models and communities in the open educational content movement. However there is a lack of research evidence relating to the effectiveness and sustainability of these models. Any funding of OER should include parallel research studies to support communities, validate processes and enable the sharing of best practice and inform future developments.

As with the OSS and OA movement, a continuing and growing debate within the OER movement can be anticipated. It seems impossible to really understand the significance of the OER movement by simply examining what it does. Its significance lies in what it is trying to achieve and the way in which it attempts to achieve it. There is a need for institutions, organisations and governments to share common interests and innovative approaches in providing open access to educational material, thereby achieving economic efficiency and raising the quality of teaching and learning in Higher Education through a global endeavour.

References:

Atkins, D, E.; Brown, J, S. and Hammond, A, L. (2007), A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges and New Opportunities, http://tinyurl.com/2swqsg

Downes, S. (2006) Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources, National Research Council Canada, www.oecd.org/document/32/0,2340,en_2649_33723_36224352_1_1_1_1,00.html.

Geser, G (2007), Open Educational Practices and Resources - OLCOS Roadmap 2012, http://www.olcos.org/cms/upload/docs/olcos_roadmap.pdf

MIT OpenCourseWare (2006), 2005 Program Evaluation Findings Report, http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/global/05_Prog_Eval_Report_Final.pdf

OECD (2007), Giving Knowledge for Free: the Emergence of Open Educational Resources, http://tinyurl.com/62hjx6.

UNESCO (2005), Open Content for Higher Education, http://www.unesco.org/iiep/virtualuniversity/media/forum/oer_forum_session_2_note.pdf

Wiley, D. (2006a) The Current State of Open Educational Resources, www.oecd.org/document/32/0,2340,en_2649_33723_36224352_1_1_1_1,00.html.

Wiley, D. (2006b) On the Sustainability of Open Educational Resource Initiatives in Higher Education, www.oecd.org/edu/oer.

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[1] The details on each initiative have been mainly sourced from the relevant websites and have not been individually critiqued.