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Are open educational re sources systematic or systemic
change agents for teaching practice?
Journal Item
How to cite:
Lane, Andy and McAndrew, Patrick (2010). Are open educational resources systematic or systemic change
agents for teaching practice? British Journal of Educational Technology, 41(6) pp. 952–962.
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2010 The Authors
Version: Accepted Manuscript
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http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2010.01119.x
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Are open educational resources systematic or systemic change agents for
teaching practice?
Andy Lane and Patrick McAndrew, The Open University
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Abstract
Open Educational Resources (OER) raise many similar issues for education to those
that have surrounded Learning Objects (LO). However the greater use and availability of
digital technologies and open licensing seems to be enabling OER to have wider
acceptance into individual and institutional teaching practice. While the need for
appropriate design in teaching and learning on the part of educators, which was the
primary driver of developments in learning objects, remains, the very openness of OER
is changing the relationships between educators, learners and content (resources) and
is becoming a primary agent of change. Experience in OpenLearn, a major initiative to
provide OER from The Open University, indicates that some of these changes can be
planned for while others will emerge as releasing content openly imposes evolutionary
pressures that accelerate change and work around barriers. Development can then be
driven by learner expectations of the technology and needs for informal life long learning
that in turn impact on how content is being designed and openly presented. It is argued
that this represents a shift from a teacher centric, systematic model of change in
teaching practices as embodied in earlier ideas about learning objects to a learner
centric, systemic model of change as embodied in OER.
Introduction
Education is a process that involves learners, teachers and sets of educational
resources that can be mediating artefacts in the educational process, all arranged in
some structured way (see Lane, 2008a). It is a purposeful human activity where learning
is the main purpose. Some of the primary roles of teachers in this purposeful human
activity are to structure and support learning experiences for learners, and develop, or
identify, the content or tools (the mediating artefacts) that need to be sourced and
ordered to make the process an educative one. Many ideas and associated
technological innovations have influenced the teaching practices that underpin the first
role – structuring learning experiences – of which a notable one in recent years has
been learning objects (LO). Learning can also occur in non-educational settings as a
purposive activity which it is useful to describe as educational even though that may not
be the primary purpose of that activity (and could be considered as vicarious or
opportunistic lifelong learning). In this case there are learners but no obvious teachers or
educational resources as the learners draw upon many different people and mediating
artefacts in their social or working environments for their learning experience. The
structuring role provided by teachers, or more broadly educators to include those with
other role in supporting the education process, may still be necessary or at least
beneficial. The approach of open educational resources (OER) addresses this by
providing structured content that is available beyond formal educational contexts.
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The origins of the concepts of learning objects and open educational resources are fairly
recent and interrelated. It can be argued that it was the growing use of digital
technologies and digital content in universities in the pre-Internet 1980s that led to re-
conceptions about how educational material could be more easily replicated and shared
between teaching practitioners. At the same time the emerging success of object
oriented programming provided a model of how it might be possible to create a plethora
of learning objects that could be effectively and efficiently used and reused individually
or in new collections by educators in different settings (e.g. Boyle et al., 2005). Wiley
(2000) collated work on the concept of learning objects, which led to significant amounts
of activity by educational technologists and software engineers to devise the systems,
processes and models to enable educators to design, share and (re)use learning objects
(McGreal, 2006; Weller et al., 2006)).
With the expansion of the Internet and the emergence of the World Wide Web (WWW) it
was also Wiley (1999) who took another major feature of software engineering – the
open licences applied to open source software that enabled community driven
improvement of the software code – and applied it to educational content. Wiley’s notion
of open content, his first attempts at an open licence, and the separate but related
developments of the Creative Commons movement and the MIT Open CourseWare
initiative then led on to the adoption of the term open educational resources at a
UNESCO meeting, all of these actions stimulated and supported by significant
programmatic funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (Iiyoshi and
Kumar, 2008). Further developments in the WWW and Web2.0 technologies have since
then spawned new forms of individual, institutional and community content development,
sharing and (re)use, only some of which has a planned educational purpose.
Amidst these technological and social changes there have been a number of
developments in teaching practices in higher education. Most of these can be
characterised as either individual-led adoption of technologies that support classroom
based teaching and replace previous technologies e.g. the use of digital presentations
and electronic whiteboards replacing overhead projectors and blackboards rather than or
as the institutional-led adoption of technologies such as Learning Management Systems
or Virtual Learning Environments that replicate previous practices e.g. online rather than
physical bulletin boards, and digital rather than paper handouts. It is only more recently
that the more widespread ownership and use of both laptops and Web 2.0 technologies
by students has stimulated lecturers to consider and devise more innovative use of new
technologies in teaching (Johnson et al., 2010).
Comparing learning objects and open educational resources
One way of establishing the value of a new technology is to understand both the claimed
benefits by its developers and the perceived motivations for using it by the target groups.
The concept of learning objects has been bedevilled by different interpretations of them
as was acknowledged by Wiley (2000), Littlejohn (2003) and by the many authors in
McGreal (2006). Friesen (2009) usefully notes that:
‘Each definition highlights (either directly or indirectly) modularity as a
technological and design attribute for the object and its content, emphasizing the
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“self-contained”, “building block” or ”object-oriented” nature of the technology.’
(Friesen, 2009, p2)
With learning objects the claimed benefits are the ability to create learning experiences
more effectively and efficiently by configuring and reconfiguring different elements (such
as content, tools, assessments, activities), all managed within an embracing content
management system or virtual learning environment. In particular the creation of
common and/or shared tools and content that could be used and reused in many
different contexts by many different lecturers is seen as a way of improving both the
effectiveness and efficiency of teaching practices and hence the related learning
experiences for students.
As a technology seemingly targeted at teachers but mainly supported through their
institution’s technological infrastructure, learning objects have not apparently influenced
much teaching practice or discourse about practice beyond educational technologists.
The perceived motivations for teachers to use learning objects do not seem very
different to the claimed benefits. And yet there appear to be a number of de-motivating
factors. First there is an opportunity cost in learning to use the particular form of such
new technologies especially as the technology keeps changing (affected by both
technical standards and ease of interoperability); second the language and culture of a
more theory driven systematised process of learning design does not match up well with
the more craft based, intuitive approach to teaching in most Universities; third early
adopters can intimidate later adopters who may then lack confidence in the technology;
fourth is the strong academic values around concepts of plagiarism and the ‘ripping-off’
of other peoples work; and fifth and probably most significant, there are often not the
policies and practices in place within higher education institutes to support and reward
innovative teaching practices (Hatakka, 2009; Gannon-Cook et al, 2009).
Many authors have acknowledged there is a need to distinguish between the technical
and pedagogical aspects of LO emphasising that their pedagogic value is most
important. Nevertheless few authors provide satisfactory answers as to how online
education using learning objects will become a widespread phenomenon. That is due, in
part, to a disconnection between the principles and everyday practice, with many of the
technologies and systems reported on seemingly being pushed out to unsuspecting
users rather than there being a demand pull from teachers and students alike to have
these technologies and systems. It is also in part due to the parochial nature of some
seemingly very successful developments designed for and implemented in one
institution but where there is little likelihood of the technologies and processes being
adopted by other institutions which have already got other technologies and processes
in place.
The concept of open educational resources is equally subject to different interpretations
and variant names such as open educational content, open courseware and open
learning resources (Friesen, 2009). However behind all the names it is largely agreed
that:
OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public
domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits
their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full
courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software,
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and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to
knowledge (Atkins, Brown and Hammond, 2007, p4).
As Friesen points out, the definitions of OER do not explicitly include notions of
standards and modular design; while LO do not include notions of openness. Both have
notions of sharing and an economy of use although LO appear to acknowledge the
intellectual property rights of the developers within the content and be more
commercially minded whereas many OER are explicitly released under a non-
commercial use licence (and even with those that do not preclude commercial use, there
is little evidence to date of successfully monetising free content).
The claimed benefits of OER are more extensive than LO. As Hylén (2007) notes ‘The
reasons for individuals and institutions to use, produce and share OER can be divided
into basic technological, economic, social and legal drivers’. He went on to explore six
incentives for institutions to become involved as a provider of OER that can be
summarised as: 1. sharing knowledge is a good thing in itself; 2. it increases the value of
existing investment of public money; 3. it can cut costs and improve quality; 4. it can be
good for public relations; 5. it provides a chance to explore new global business models;
and 6. open sharing will stimulate innovation. Hylén also examined four motivations for
teachers as: 1. sharing knowledge being a basic academic value; 2. the increase in
personal reputation in an open community; 3. being a leader in their field; and 4. there is
little value in keeping the resource closed.
While these lists provide a good starting point, they do not fully reflect who are the target
audiences for OER and the different motivations that they offer for institutions and
individuals as noted for the UK Open University (McAndrew, 2006; Gourley and Lane,
2009; McAndrew et al, 2009). For the UK Open University there have been the following
benefits of OER:
• Enhancing the reputation of The Open University.
• Extending the reach to new users and communities.
• Recruitment of students from those who come to see OpenLearn.
• Supporting widening participation.
• Providing an experimental base of material for use within the university.
• Accelerating uptake and use of new technologies.
• Acting as a catalyst for less formal collaborations and partnerships.
Similarly, the perceived benefits to lecturers or other educators given by Hylén are for
the primary authors of OER, not the secondary users of the OER as noted by the OU,
and are equally diverse but have been found to include (McAndrew et al, 2009):
• Investigating the OU approach to teaching a particular topic;
• Downloading OpenLearn OER study units for incorporation into courses, whether
online, blended or face to face;
• Using study units as recommended or supplementary reading for an existing
course;
• Reworking and localising study units for their own purposes and their own
contexts;
• Sharing materials and ideas with other educators worldwide;
• Collaborating with others in developing new OER;