Neil Butcher

“ ICT use is expanding the range of options available to educational planners in terms of the teaching and learning strategies they choose to use, providing an often bewildering array of choices in terms of systems design options, teaching and learning combinations, and strategies for administering and managing education. ICT use is allowing for exponential increases in the transfer of data through increasingly globalized communication systems, and connecting growing numbers of people through those networks. ”

“ In this context, governments are often in a position to require that educationally useful material developed with public funds be made available under open licences. While there may sometimes be reasons for not requiring open licensing, the sharing of educational materials has significant potential to improve the quality, transparency and accessibility of higher education systems. Likewise, governments can use open licensing regimes to increase the leverage of public investments, by facilitating widespread reuse of those resources with minimal additional investment. ”

“ As more institutions around the world are, at different levels, requiring their educators to share more materials under open licences, experiences clearly demonstrate that this opening of intellectual property to peer scrutiny is having the effect of improving quality of teaching and learning materials. This happens both because educators tend to invest time in improving their materials before sharing them openly and because the feedback they receive from peer and student scrutiny helps them to make further improvements. ”

“ Student bodies can actively support and promote strategies to allow students to assist in sourcing, adapting and producing OER in partnership with academic staff. Furthermore, student bodies can help to shape the nature and quality of students’ educational experiences by encouraging and supporting the use of OER for the purposes of self-directed study and, at the more advanced levels, by having students create their own curriculum/courses of study. ”

“ Thus, for most educators, the incentives lie in changing the institutional and national policies and budgetary frameworks so that they reward collaboration and open sharing of knowledge. Even if institutional and national policies and budgetary frameworks do not reward collaboration and open sharing of knowledge, there are still incentives for educators to share their resources openly. Open licences maximize the likelihood of content-sharing taking place in a transparent way that protects the moral rights of content authors. ”

“ A logical consequence of reconsidering human resource policy will be development or updating of costing/resourcing and performance management systems so that they reward staff for the following:
Time spent in developing educational resources. Using resource-based learning where it is more effective than lecturing. Harnessing other people's materials when it is more cost-effective than producing materials from scratch. Sharing their intellectual capital through global knowledge networks to improve their resources and to raise both their and their institution's profile. ”

“ The use of resource-based learning does not of course imply any intrinsic improvements in quality of learning experience. The extent to which shifting the communication of curriculum to instructionally designed resources leads improves the quality of education depends entirely on the quality of the resources developed. ”

“ ICT use is reducing barriers to entry of potential competitors to educational institutions, by reducing the importance of geographical distance as a barrier, by reducing the overhead and logistical requirements of running educational programmes and research agencies, and by expanding cheap access to information resources. There has been an explosion in collective sharing and generation of knowledge as a consequence of growing numbers of connected people, and the proliferation of so-called Web 2.0 technologies. ”

“ Open learning is an approach to education that seeks to remove all unnecessary barriers to learning, while aiming to provide students with a reasonable chance of success in an education and training system centred on their specific needs and located in multiple arenas of learning. ”

“ Proving the potential of a concept that will only have an impact when these infrastructural constraints are removed is of little value to higher educational institutions in the short to medium term.
Thus, the value of OER projects and initiatives should be measured, in practical terms, against the extent to which they advance core educational objectives; and the principles of operation that govern OER communities should be driven by this imperative. Education is a social investment, and should be protected as such if it is truly to fulfil its potential in creating a more equal world. ”

“ In such an environment, it is foreseeable that reputation will grow by making content available as a way of publicizing competence in providing support, assessment, and accreditation. Increasingly, people who seek to ring-fence, protect and hide their educational content and research will most likely place limits on their academic careers. They will also increasingly be excluded from opportunities to improve their teaching practice and domain-specific knowledge by sharing and collaborating with growing networks of academics around the world. ”

“ No matter what technologies or methodologies may be used, the simple reality is that good education cannot be created or sustained without spending properly on it. Investment in education can only ever be meaningfully justified in terms of the long-term social and economic benefits that it will bring societies, not in terms of how those investments will help to enrol more students at progressively declining unit costs. ”

“ What does the notion of resource-based learning mean, in essence? It means moving away from the traditional notion of the 'talking teacher' to communicate curriculum; a significant but varying proportion of communication between students and educators is not face to face but rather takes place through the use of different media as necessary. ”

“ Will OER be co-opted as another in a long line of ultimately failed cost-cutting exercises? Or will it be harnessed as part of a strategy to invest more wisely and effectively in education, in the belief that producing intellectual leadership through free and open development and sharing of common intellectual capital is a worthwhile and socially essential activity for a healthy society? ”

“ But online communities have demonstrated the now indisputable power and value of lots of people working collaboratively towards a common cause. And doing this in education has the potential to re-focus educational systems, restoring the core values of building and sharing knowledge that underpin good education, and systematically encouraging us to work with and learn from one another. ”

“ Historically, educational institutions and educators have often been actively encouraged to protect their intellectual capital closely. Thus, sharing teaching practices, approaches, and materials will not necessarily be a common practice. Consequently, inviting colleagues to share materials with each other may be met with resistance and scepticism. Recognizing that this is an historical legacy of how education has tended to function, it is important to find ways to shift this culture, and to encourage ways of sharing materials that are not threatening to educators. ”

“ Open Schooling Initiatives
Open Schooling is increasingly recognised as a feasible solution to the lack of qualified teachers and conventional schools in the developing world. With primary school enrolments growing successfully to meet the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of Universal Primary Education, many nations simply cannot accommodate the corresponding increase in potential secondary school students. The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) defines Open Schooling by two elements [7] :
The physical separation of the school-level student from the teacher ”

“ Another major advantage of this 'blurring' is that 'distance educators' and 'face to-face educators' can turn from meaningless debates about the relative virtues of particular methods of educational provision, to consideration of the nature of learning and the educational value of a course's structure and content. Educators often find it necessary to equate particular methods of education with good quality education, in an effort to market the programmes they are offering and give them added status over programmes using different methods of provision. ”

“ Open source is the concept and practice of enabling access by both users and developers, to the programme source code, enabling both developers and users to be able to modify or add features to the source code and redistribute it. [1] In this regard, collaboration and circulation are central tenets to the open source movement. Open source software offers an alternative to proprietary courseware, in education. Open source software is cost effective as it does not entail licence fees, has open standards that facilitate integration with other systems and can be easily customised. ”