ACODE workshop - Open Educational Resources

I always find ACODE meetings fruitful - a group of senior university reps meet to engage with topical issues in elearning. No institutional politics, no need to convince anyone that elearning works.

The workshop on Open Educational Resources on November 11^th was no exception – in fact, the outcomes were more productive than anticipated. A working group convened to further explore the topic of my most recent publication ‘how to promote sustainability of elearning initiatives’. This challenge has been around since at least 1990. Start up grants are used up, and where does support come from then? Options include commercialization, institutionalization and limping along on the smell of an oily rag! None of which seems to be ideal. My ALT-J article (Gunn 2010) offers one solution. Guthrie et al (2008) offer a different one. Either way, the problem hasn’t gone away.

Other unanticipated outcomes were more challenging – opinions I didn’t know I had came shooting to the surface and caused a great deal of discomfort for someone in my profession.

The open educational resources (OER) movement brings a very different perspective to issues of sustainability, reuse and ownership. An OECD report defines the term OER as ‘materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research’. I often wonder if formal definitions are necessary. Things remain what they are without such descriptions, though the academic community and others insist on applying them.

Anyway, the concept of open access is useful - compelling even – and is more than a blip on some distant horizon. At the end of the day, decisions about the future of this movement may not be made by academics or governments.

After formalities, the workshop opens with some future gazing by Prof James Taylor from Uni of Southern Queensland. So many more students are going through tertiary education that open scholarship will provide the only viable (cost-effective) means of sustaining access on the scale required. This statement is set against the backdrop of a news report I watched at Auckland airport the same morning. Thousands of students kicking in the door of conservative party headquarters in London because of recently announced education budget cuts and the end of fee capping. Prof Taylor has a good point about long term viability, but where does that leave the academic community as we know it? Chasing the dinosaur perhaps?

Clearly in a stroppy mood that day, a session on ‘ethics and intellectual property’ left me wondering if we have to try to squeeze absolutely everything into existing shapes and systems. Statements described as ‘anarchy’ and ‘provocation’ from the floor tell me the answer is ‘yes we do’ - unfortunately though - not ‘yes we can’! The walls are breaking down, even as we maintain the illusion of security within.

A really provocative question surfaced in a lively presentation from OER Foundation Director Wayne Mackintosh. ‘Why would you replicate the loaves and fishes episode if the hungry couldn’t afford to eat them?’ Nice analogy Wayne! I think the answer lies somewhere on the capitalism - politics continuum. It was cool to see an e-book being pulled together so quickly and easily from freely available resources, but will we really look back and wonder why it took us so long to get on the sustainable / renewable resource bandwagon. Or will we be too engrossed in licking the wounds of redundancy for the question to even arise?

With such disturbing thoughts buzzing around, an albeit highly informative session on creative commons licensing smacked of the establishment attempting to survive in a rapidly changing world. What happens if authors don’t specifically grant permission at the point of creation? Are they guilty until proved innocent?

Another session featured some interesting case studies including one where students created OERs as their course assessment. The high point of the workshop for me was when the student / presenter learned how many hits that work had attracted. Discussion and a call to action rounded off a stimulating day, which is recorded in more ‘conventional’ thought forms in the workshops section of ACODE’s website at http://acode.edu.au/activities.php Though I have to note that some areas of the site are not... open… for public viewing.