Transcript

PRESENTER:

What do we mean by OER? Just recently, well there’s one definition. There are many, and they range from really quite narrow to pretty broad. ‘Digitised materials offered freely and openly for educated students and self learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research.’

Not necessarily materials that are originally created with education in mind. They merely have to be potentially relevant to education. And you’re talking about a very wide range of granularity. I mean, this ranges from the whole course, which is what the OpenCourseWare initiative focused on initially.

And the OpenCourseWare consortium, again, initially based on. Down to just items like photos or diagrams, which can be incredibly useful. And that’s quite an interesting task to set yourself to find a Creative Commons licence diagram of something even as commonplace as an eye, a human eye, to see just how easy it is to find that.

And many things in between. Modules, topics, case studies or articles from newsletters, magazines, et cetera. The first one is perhaps fairly obvious, but a good OER is ‘findable’. It’s awfully easy to lose something completely. You know it exists, and still you can’t find it.

So it’s really important to put your resource somewhere where people are going to find it. The best place is usually, if you’re lucky enough to be part of a community that has a repository that is specific to them, take for example LORO for language teachers, or Medev run a resource for medical teachers, and so on.

That’s often the best place, but don’t forget you can put resources in multiple places. They don’t have to be in just one place. A good OER is ‘clearly described’. This is also often overlooked. You go to somewhere like, I don’t know, Jorum, which is one of the repositories, and you find a sort of supposed description of the object, the resource.

But it tells you so little. It doesn’t give you nearly enough information to be able to tell without examining the resource itself in some detail, whether it’s going to meet your need or not. So this is a sort of rather neglected area, where we are. The description of it. The whole question of metadata and sort of formal descriptions has come and gone.

But generally it’s a lost cause, really, to have proper metadata to describe learning resources. But, nevertheless, you need something. ‘Clearly licensed’ – you’d be surprised how many OERs are implicitly licensed for use and reuse by others, rather than explicitly. It would appear to be the case, but you search in vain for anything that actually clearly indicates what licence is being applied to this.

And any sort of exceptions that might apply. So that’s a sign of a good resource. Clearly licensed and visibly licensed. ‘From a source you trust’ – it really does make quite a difference, knowing where something comes from. It doesn’t mean to say an OER from someone you’ve never heard of and a university you’ve never heard of couldn’t be a good resource.

It depends (a) on where you found it, as well. If you found it in a place where, generally speaking, you trust what’s put there as being good, worthwhile quality, then that’s probably a reasonable thing. But often the institution it comes from, the reputation of the individual, et cetera, these are good guides.

‘Easy to modify’ – it’s no good just saying something is licensed as share alike, i.e. something that you are entitled to modify. If you’re sharing it as a PDF, and you’ll be amazed how many OERs are published as PDFs. And that’s absolutely fine if all you want to do is use it exactly as is.

But if you want to use it as part of something else, and modify it and adapt it, that’s useless. So it needs to be easy to modify both technically and organisationally. You know, the way it’s structured needs to be such that it can easily be disassembled and reassembled.

‘Free-standing – does not assume knowledge of other resources’ – I mean, this is quite a problem for us, to mention that we now as a matter of routine aim to put 10 per cent of all OU modules out as open educational resources. But it’s quite a lot of work making sure that that 10 per cent doesn’t make all sorts of assumptions about bits that haven’t been included. So it needs to be free-standing.

A good OER is ‘free of copyright content’. You’d have thought all OERs would be free of copyright content, but they’re not. And the OU is certainly, the OU policy has been to include copyright content where we can get it licensed. So you may well have something that isn’t OER, but has been licensed for use in a particular context within an OER.

But then when you reuse it, you would not be covered to use that copyright material, which is a bit of a pain if you’re in that position. So I would say a good OER is free of that. And another sign of a good OER is it’s being used or recommended by people like you.

You know, the recommendation makes a big help. And my last point, a good OER is ‘imperfect’. Now that’s a funny thing to say, but what I mean is you don’t need perfection in OER. The judge of its worth is whether it meets your need.