Neil Butcher

“ Doing this openly, using the already proven innovations of the Internet to facilitate sharing of content, presents a practical way to use cooperation to find simple solutions to pressing problems we face in education. If educators start doing this in large numbers, the values of the systems for which they work will catch up, as all systems ultimately are simply a codification of how people have agreed to work and interact with one another. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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 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 ”

“ Being organized effectively as a consumers' cooperative, the idea of open source is to eliminate the access costs to the consumer and the creator by reducing the restrictions of copyright. It is intended that this will lead to creation of additional works, which build upon previous works and lead to greater social benefit. Additionally some proponents argue that open source also relieves society of the administration and enforcement costs of copyright. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To what extent do current policies motivate educators to invest at least a portion of their time in ongoing curriculum design, creation of effective teaching and learning environments within courses and programmes, and development of high quality teaching and learning materials? Some institutions already have policies that encourage such investments, either through inclusion of these elements in job descriptions, inclusion of these activities in rewards, incentives, and promotions policies, and/or appointment of people and units dedicated to these tasks. ”

“ Consequently, it is opportune for educational institutions to think strategically about the extent to which their policies, practices, and institutional cultures reward individual endeavour over collaboration and create inefficiencies by prizing, in principle, creation of ‘new’ materials over adaptation and use of existing materials and content. As the amount of content freely accessible online proliferates, such approaches to procuring materials increasingly seem unnecessarily wasteful. ”

“ Systemically, ICT use is tending to accentuate social disparities between rich and poor. Increasingly, investment in ICT is being seen by educational planners as a necessary part of establishing competitive advantage, because it is attractive to students (particularly in those parts of the world where young people have increasingly ubiquitous access to ICT) and because it is deemed essential by governments, parents, employers and other key funders of education. ”