Open Education Resources (OER) has become an important part of the discussion surrounding the delivery and development of content for education. A wide adoption of the internet around the world has increased the availability and the ease of sharing content for all fields, including education. This means that with sharing there is a need to look at ownership, copyright, intellectual rights and different ways that the concept of ownership will need to change to accommodate a new sharing community. Traditionally, education and the creation of content has been kept within walls of the institute as though it is something to be hidden until the creator is ready to share. The launch of OER has challenged those ideals and has caused a disruption with these traditionally held beliefs of ownership. There is also a concern on the implementation side with the level of quality of the materials created. There are concerns that with the ease of creation there will be lower oversight among these materials and that with no quality benchmark being set, using these materials will hurt the reputation of the institution. To help prevent quality issues there are solutions being implemented and explored. The history of OER has shown that while there are issues that need to be addressed, the solutions are being explored to allow ease of sharing and use which will be beneficial in the growth of OER.

One of the biggest issues arising from OER materials are copyright and intellectual property issues due to lack of awareness and understanding of copyright. Jan Hylen (2006) looks at the copyright and usage issues with an exploration of the different types of copyrights that have been created, such as Creative Commons, GNU Free Documentation License and the RoMEO project to allow academics the ability to share their materials but still retain some of their rights in how and when the materials are used. It was found by Atkins, D. E., Brown, J. S., & Hammond, A. L. (2007) that removing barriers surrounding copyright or intellectual property could help spur the creation of more OER materials. The creation of open licensing has given creators a way to allow their materials to become more public but along with this there is a need for education on what open licensing, typically the Creative Commons licenses, mean. This education is the goal of guides like the one created for UNESCO by Butcher, N., Kanwar, A., & Uvalic-Trumbic, S. (2011). These licenses have been in place for many years but it this education that will remove the barriers exposed by Atkins (2007) and Hylen (2006). The evolution of OER can be seen when looking at the dates of these articles and how long it has taken to create a guide to remove barriers.

There is a concern that with the introduction of OER there will be a reduction in quality of education. The quality concerns mean that there is an assurance of quality that will need to be addressed. The fact that OER resources are extremely easy to find and create means that there is a need for oversight to ensure that content created meets minimum quality levels set forth by the institutions. This requires that the organization implementing OER creates a process to ensure quality by using methods such as brand reputation or peer review. This brand recognition is explored in both Johnstone, S. M. (2005) and Marshall S. Smith & Catherine M. Casserly (2006) when they introduce MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) in 2001 and the work done by David Wiley at Utah State University in their creation of Open Learning Support (OLS). The legitimacy of OER is also enhanced by the Butcher, N. (2011) report which was sponsored by UNESCO and supported by the Hewlett Foundation which meant there was both money and legitimate support. The report itself addresses this need when it identifies that sponsoring high-quality content through funding will encourage a higher quality of material. Sponsored funding gives the support to address the concerns about quality assurance by encouraging the creation of the benchmarks needed before anything could be considered valid. This promotion through funding will also help to remove the barriers of quality.

The benefits of spreading OER have also been expounded and the belief that it will be beneficial in numerous ways is something that seems to drive the push behind the exploration. This belief can be seen in the titles of articles delving into these topics such as the ones used in this particular exploration. With titles like “The Promise of Open Educational Resources” and “Open Educational Resources Serve the World” it is easy to see how the optimism of OER is a part of what is going to help the spread of these materials worldwide. The benefits of spreading OER is discussed in how it allows development from worldwide academic sources to increase accessibility. The worry is that by making all of this education easily accessible there would be a devaluing of that education and the institutes using it. This worry can be refuted when looking at the reputations of many of the institutes that have implemented and embraced OER including the MIT OpenCourseWare which has not been detrimental to their reputation.

The issues that do arise in the research of OER are often because of the fact that while the promise of OER is that there will be worldwide implementation, the research and reality focuses specifically on the United States (US) and implementation there. This is not surprising when looking at the specific locations of the work done and it can be seen that the hope is that it will be expanded through groups such as UNESCO. The US supporters of OER are giving substantial support in both promotion and funding but that means that the education can also be seen as US centric which brings along the issue of a North American bias spreading into the content and that can become problematic.

With new internet technology making it easier to share learning materials that are constantly being created there will be a need to start addressing the issues that come along with that. As more content is created it will mean that there will need to be a very concerted effort made to ensure that this content is valid. This will mean that as the issue of quality assurance is addressed there will need to be benchmarks created that will allow a clean implementation and a sustained reputation in the quality of education provided by the institutes using these OERs. Quality assurance will be something that will need to be created at both the micro level in the institute and at a more macro level from organizations promoting these resources. Along with the quality there will need to be better education of the creators to allow them to understand the licenses that their work will fall under. The push towards better licensing like Creative Commons should allow a better understanding of the rights that are given to a creator about how their work will be used. If the spread of OER continues in the direction it is going with a focus on solving the concerns it will become an extremely important element in the future of education worldwide.

References

Atkins, D. E., Brown, J. S., & Hammond, A. L. (2007). A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities. Retrieved September 30, 2018, from http://www.oerderves.org

Butcher, N., Kanwar, A., & Uvalic-Trumbic, S. (2011). A Basic guide to open educational resources (OER). Vancouver, BC: UNESCO and Commonwealth of Learning

Hylén, J. (2006). Open educational resources: Opportunities and challenges. Proceedings of Open Education, 4963. Paris, France: OECD’s Centre for Educations Research and Innovation

Johnstone, S. M. (2005). Open Educational Resources Serve the World. Retrieved from https://er.educause.edu/articles/2005/1/open-educational-resources-serve-the-world

Marshall S. Smith & Catherine M. Casserly (2006) The Promise of Open Educational Resources. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 38(5), 8-17.