Transcript

PRESENTER:

What does ‘open’ mean in Open Education Resources? Or what do you think it means? So who’s for saying it’s just enough that it’s openly accessible online? That's good enough to be open. No? Why not? Why is that not good enough?

SPEAKER 1:

I don’t think that’s what Open Education Resources are about. I link Open Education Resources more to the open source movement and such, because that’s partly my background. And I think that a lot of things are openly available online, in that you can go and view them.

But you might not be able to use it in your education, in your teaching, because you actually only want a part of what is available, and you can’t take that part because it’s wrapped up in a way that you can’t access it. And that is the significant difference to me for OER, is that I could take the middle chunk of a package and just pull that out to use it with my students. And I don’t have to take the whole thing.

PRESENTER:

Okay. Anybody want to disagree with that?

SPEAKER 2:

I wouldn’t disagree, as I think it’s really frustrating when you come across a resource that you can’t actually just take the pieces. But I’d still say that I think some of the ideas in this sort of – we’re talking about a resource that Ursula found – and it’s the idea of it, and the presentation of it that you can take away as well.

And so that might mean that you have to put some work in to create something based on it, but you’re still openly using that resource, I think. Technically, I think it should be something you have openly available. You can reuse, re-create. But then, yeah, I think there’s sort of all sorts of ideas about you put a piece of work up, and it might be in a PDF format, but you can still use the wording or the ideas, or the check sheet, and re-create something in your own resource.

SPEAKER 3:

Is that just not using an idea, then? If I have a conversation with you ...

SPEAKER 2:

But I’ve still got it out openly.

PRESENTER:

It seems that, you’ve got to be openly licensed. Just being up there in full copyright is no good. You could use it as is. You want it to be openly licensed because, as you’ll learn about later, as I’m sure didn’t know, open licensing is prior permission for you to use, reuse, adapt that material. Should it be in open formats? Should it be in Open Office? Should you just use Open Office? Open document format?

SPEAKER 4:

I think it’s gotta to whatever’s easiest for people to use. To try to make it as inclusive as possible. So even like we said before, as much as you may hate Microsoft, you’ve still got to acknowledge that most people are using that. So I think it needs to be available in all formats. As widely as possible.

SPEAKER 1:

You’ve got to mention accessibility. So you’ve got an extra layer there, haven’t you? You’re putting things up on the web. You have a legal responsibility to make it as accessible as possible to people with a range of disabilities.

So, inevitably, you should already be putting things up in PDF for people who’ve got a visual impairment, or Word for people who’ve got [INAUDIBLE]. You should already be exploring those alternatives.

SPEAKER 3:

Accessibility. Doesn’t that answer your question, then? Because you’re saying about Word. That’s not an open format. You can’t have it. I mean, you can save it as an open ...

SPEAKER 4:

ODT.

SPEAKER 3:

ODT. You can say it is, but people don’t. They save it as doc. So in a sense, I presume accessibility to me is read doc files. I presume it can read ODT files as well, but, you know.

SPEAKER 4:

Screenreader.

PRESENTER:

So you don’t need to use open source software, then, to create it?

SPEAKER 4:

I don’t think so, no. But you can.

SPEAKER 5:

But if you haven’t used open source software, and it’s safe in a proprietary format, that excludes a lot of people from being able to use it to mix and match, and create other objects from it.

SPEAKER 3:

I think it depends what you mean by ‘proprietary’. Word is proprietary, but everybody uses it. The fact that it’s proprietary isn’t the problem. It’s the availability of the software that would be the problem.

SPEAKER 4:

I think it’s trying to include as many people as possible. To make it as inclusive as you can. That’s my opinion.

SPEAKER 6:

With open source software, it can be quite limiting to some extent. Like I was accessing one a couple of weeks ago, and it’s a tool that someone was trying to do a presentation on. It was open source, and there was a chat functionality. And it was all on the left-hand side, there was all the information about, you know, links to documentation, and basically all open educational resources.

And yet most of the time, everyone was complaining about how it wasn’t actually useful at all, because they might have just had it as a static web page instead of something that wasn’t as interactive as they thought.

So I think really it’s not just a case of being openly accessible, even through an open source software. I think it was that you need to consider if it’s going to be viable for everyone to use, even though most are computer illiterate. I think that is definitely a factor. It’s not just a case of obviously using Word or open source.

PRESENTER:

So, there are lots of different factors involved here.

SPEAKER 7:

I think that I would use it. I would definitely use it if it could fit to my target audience. It’s something like you said about implicitness. For example, I’m in favour of using Xerte. Xerte has the layer of accessibility. You can go and put extra HTML and modify it if you want to. You can create a different template if you want to.

It has many functions. I mean, you can enlarge the screen. You can change the colours, you can change the fonts. It’s up to the user to adapt it to the circumstances, individual circumstances.

So if it does fit, I’m in favour of using it. Like Moodle, for example. The majority of institutions are moving towards Moodle. So we are trying to find ways of making Moodle more user friendly, or to adapt it somehow. [INAUDIBLE]. I think it’s very important.

SPEAKER 4:

Do you think the issue of community is more important than resources, though? Because, from my point of view, it’s like I want as many people as possible to be coming to that place to share their knowledge. And to contribute, to build up a sort of shared resources, shared knowledges. And to sort of build that knowledge community together.

PRESENTER:

Yes. It’s very important. I’ll come back to that. And while we were starting out, I was just thinking about what it is about Open Education Resource, and what’s there. Here’s some meanings of open, one of the four questions there. Because there are different types of openness, and they affect different aspects of the resource and how people use. There’s the availability, as we talked about.

There’s accessibility. This is affordability. Do you have to buy proprietary software? Do you have to be able to get it? Do you have to be able to pay high charges to access the internet? To actually access it, as is the case in many parts of the world. And is that resource actually acceptable? Is it acceptable in the form it’s in? Is it acceptable for the use? Is there other things about it?

One thing, there is many different aspects of this, and often you hear people talk about Open Education Resource is about being free resources for free, and it’s just with open source software this is starting to blur the distinctions of something being free, free to access, although it might not be totally free to access, because you’ve got to get onto the internet to do it. There are charges there.

As opposed to the freedoms. What’s important about open licensing is with open source software or with education resources is the freedoms that it gives you as a user to do that. And so, with all these dimensions, and you’ll find some people who think all these are important in terms of Open Education Resources should be free cultural works, and you should be using open and free throughout.

But of course, in terms of the pragmatics, it can be, as we discussed, that open access to something online to use as is may be sufficient for the situation in which you’re using it. Either you as a teacher or, perhaps more importantly, as you as a learner or a student. Does it matter to you as a student that it, oh I can change this, but why do I want to change it? I just want to learn from this.

And so there’s different elements about openness, and you have to think about them in terms of who it is that’s involved. We’ve already seen one definition of OER. There’s a lot of definitions go around here, because there is a lot of this, not fuzziness, but there’s different issues and complexity built into that.

But I like this one, which Stephen Downes, a quite renowned person in e-learning circles, did – ‘Open educational resources are materials used to support education that may be freely accessed, reused, modified, and shared by anyone’. It still doesn’t overcome this ...

There are still other issues behind that, but it is a quite simple definition to show that these are resources which are to be freely accessed, reused, modified, and shared. They’re free, and that freely is about the freedoms, not about that it’s at no cost. Because there is always some cost involved.