Open educational resources

“ Cape Town Open Education Declaration:
Unlocking the promise of open educational resources We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. 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. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go. ”

“ Educators and learners: First, we encourage educators and learners to actively participate in the emerging open education movement. Participating includes: creating, using, adapting and improving open educational resources; embracing educational practices built around collaboration, discovery and the creation of knowledge; and inviting peers and colleagues to get involved. Creating and using open resources should be considered integral to education and should be supported and rewarded accordingly. ”

“ Freely accessible and changeable high quality content can underpin experiments in widening participation, use of mobile devices, development of tools for accessibility, geographically distributed experiments and community building. As a catalyst for further research Open Educational Resources have a significant part to play, as a possible indication of how people will learn in the future they are a vital move away from rigid structures that are causing their own pressures. ”

“ OpenLearn gives us an exciting opportunity to see what happens when we release many of the restrictions that we are used to; copyright, fees, and geography. We see Open Educational Resources as having revolutionary potential that we must study but also as a basis for further innovation. ”

“ Academic ­publishing is a practice that is at the core of academic identity, and as such, this fundamental change in its nature illustrates the impact of ­openness, and the importance of engaging with its future direction.
If open access publishing is the most established area for open education, then open educational resources runs a close ­second and offers a comparative study of a movement being owned largely by universities themselves. ”

“ Keywords Open Educational Resources, Open Educational Practices, Open Education, Wikipedia, Centers for Teaching and Learning, Higher Education.
1. INTRODUCTION Educators and education institutions are increasingly looking to engage with Open Educational Resources (OER) , and with practices based on participation in online learning communities like Wikipedia, as they update their teaching practices. There is great potential in these realms, but there is a scarcity of useful, formal research and case studies to inform innovation and experimentation. ”

“ A pedagogy of abundance focuses on content, however, which is an important, but not sole element in the overall approach. Perhaps it is better to talk of a pedagogy of openness. Open pedagogy makes use of open content, such as open educational resources, videos, podcasts, etc., but also places an emphasis on the network and the learner’s connections within this. ”

“ Content licences that encourage activity and creation by students through re-use and adaptation of that content can make a significant contribution to creating more effective learning environments. OER has potential to build capacity by providing institutions and educators access, at low or no cost, to the means of production to develop their competence in producing educational materials and carrying out the necessary instructional design to integrate such materials into high quality programmes of learning. ”

“ Although use of OER can support open learning/open education, the two are not the same. Making 'open education' or 'open learning' a priority has significantly bigger implications than only committing to releasing resources as open or using OER in educational programmes. It requires systematic analysis of assessment and accreditation systems, student support, curriculum frameworks, mechanisms to recognize prior learning, and so on, in order to determine the extent to which they enhance or impede openness. ”

“ When educational institutions support their educators, staff, and learners in moving from closed to open content and practices, Open Education thrives. Educators want to design the best courses, adjust their practices and pedagogy to empower learners to co-create knowledge, and push the limits of knowledge by openly sharing their ideas and resources with a global audience. ”

“ WHEREAS, as head of the business management program at RCC, Ruth Greene championed the adoption of open educational resources and low-cost textbooks, easing the financial burden for students and making the school more accessible to all ”

“ Programme, course and materials design and development expertise, with a particular focus on helping academic staff harness the full potential of resource-based learning and student-centred pedagogies in their rogrammes and courses. An understanding of educational approaches is important (e.g., being able to differentiate among open, distance, electronic and blended learning, and their respective merits) , as is an understanding of the context of education in the specific sector in which work is taking place. ”

“ Resource-based learning is not a synonym for distance education. Rather, resource-based learning provides a basis for transforming the culture of teaching across all educational systems to enable those systems to offer better quality education to significantly larger numbers of students. Many courses and programmes at all levels of education now incorporate extensive use of instructionally designed resources, as educators have learned the limitations of lecture-based strategies for communicating information to students. ”

“ To overcome technical and cultural obstacles, the Learning Commons will provide advice and expertise to the OER community and will identify lessons learned. Through partnerships and competitions, the Learning Commons will highlight successful and innovative uses and reuses of OER. All of this is important legal infrastructure for OER and beyond.
“Openness” is complex and not a black-and-white issue—a spectrum of degrees of resource openness is developing. The future holds opportunities and challenges for enriching and exploiting this spectrum. ”

“ Academic staff may find existing OER to be useful benchmarks for reflecting on and improving their own curriculum and pedagogy as well as those of others. Such exploration and peer support/review may also develop their confidence to share new and/or adapted resources to address curriculum gaps in the existing pool of OER, which would enable them to contribute to global knowledge. ”

“ Re-conceptualizing methods of educational provision as existing somewhere on this imaginary continuum has the result that certain methods of provision are no longer chosen to the exclusion of others, depending on whether they are 'distance' or 'face-to-face' educational opportunities. Rather, educational providers, when constructing educational courses, are able to choose, from a wide variety, those methods that are most appropriate for the context in which they will be providing learning opportunities. ”

“ A tremendous opportunity accompanies this shift in students' needs: in all disciplines, the quantity of high quality, peer reviewed open educational resources is growing. But educators are often unaware of emerging materials and practices, or have difficulty assessing their quality. Further, the traditional culture of higher education fails to systematically encourage and reward faculty for integrating developing technology in the classroom, or it does so outside the context of the teaching and learning environment. ”

“ The need for policy change In developing curricula and learning resources, educators have always engaged with what is already available – often prescribing existing textbooks and creating reading lists of published articles for example. Even in distance education institutions with a long history of materials development, it is arguably a rare and strange occurrence to develop completely new materials with no reference to what already exists. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Resource-based learning involves communication of curriculum between students and educators through use of resources (instructionally designed and otherwise) that harness different media as necessary. Resource-based learning strategies too can be integrated into any educational programme, using any mix of contact and distance education strategies. Resource-based learning need not imply any temporal and/or spatial separation between educators and students, although many resource-based learning strategies can be used to overcome such separation. ”

“ Institutions should aspire both to create OER and to use OER from elsewhere. Well-designed learning resources encourage greater individual engagement by students with information, ideas and content than is possible with lectures alone. By making such resources an integral part of the teaching and learning process, limited face-to-face teaching time with students can be more effectively used to foster engagement and to nurture discussion, creativity, practical applications and research activities. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As educational institutions make strategic decisions to increase their levels of investment in design and development of better educational programmes, the most cost-effective way to do this is to embrace open licensing environments and harness existing OER. Thus, commitment to OER implies increased investment in teaching and learning, but promises to increase the efficiency and productivity of those investments by providing new ways of developing better programmes, courses and materials. ”

“ Moving toward openness means increasing accessibility and responsiveness. The degree of openness required depends on the purpose of the activity and the need to exercise judgment and control. Support for collaborative learning in multi-role, hybrid groups—Peer learning can only go so far. We need ways to enable hybrid learning contexts: a mixture of peers with mentors, coaches, and guides. Highly and smartly instrumented—learning in OPLI is computer mediated, especially the distributed part, and we must instrument what goes on to get some really fine-grain analysis of what is working and why. ”

“ A policy recognition of and support for the development of curriculum and learning resources in multi-skilled teams should obviate the overload of educational staff whose primary function would be the identification and quality assurance of existing OER, and where necessary development of new content. A policy commitment to the use, adaptation, and creation of appropriate OER, in support of ongoing curriculum and materials review cycles, would help to ensure that teaching and learning is seen as a continuing process of renewal. ”

“ Academic staff should understand how these policies might affect their rights. 2.4 Guidelines for student bodies As the role of universities has evolved, so too has the role of the student. Emerging trends include a need for active global citizenship, employability, transferable skills and knowledge, communication skills, creativity and innovation. Key challenges include meeting the rising costs of education (including textbooks) and identifying appropriate educational courses/programmes that meet learning needs. ”

“ In addition, releasing materials under an open licence also reduces the incentive for others to lie about the source of materials because they have permission to use them. Sharing of materials provides institutions opportunities to market their services. Educational institutions that succeed economically in an environment where content has been digitized and is increasingly easy to access online are likely to do so because they understand that their real potential educational value lies not in content itself, but in offering related services valued by their students. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A socio-technical initiative to form an open participatory learning infrastructure is critical to this culture of learning. By open participatory learning infrastructure we mean the institutional practices, technical infrastructure, and social norms that allow a smooth operation of globally distributed, high-quality open learning. We include the word “participatory” to emphasize that the focus is not just on information access, but on the role of technology in supporting the social nature of learning. ”