My own view on the three key issues in OERs are openness (sharing of knowledge and resources), access (the ability of individuals to access education) and transition (from informal to formal learning).

Openness

The ability to discover, use, reuse and redistribute resources is an important one for our Further Education context.  Wiley (2010) suggests that sharing and openness are the basis of education itself.  

One of the challenges appears to be sharing of resources once they have been acquired and re-purposed. It is surprising to read de los Arcos (2014) findings that open licenses are not viewed as an important element when educators are selecting OERs. Many educators are using and remixing content but rarely pass on the resources they have created under creative commons licenses.

Another area of concern, I am particularly aware of this, is the tendency of VLEs to restrict access to course materials to those entitled to access the course. We have addressed this in part, in our Moodle system, by giving lecturing staff the ability to venture into any course (apart from Staff Development courses!) and ‘help themselves’ to the materials within. Unfortunately, this ability does not currently extend to other online sources such as Microsoft OneNote which require specific invitations to share.  In my experience our lecturers share their OneNote spaces when they are teaching similar disciplines. We introduced a ‘learning material repository’ when those were popular but the materials mostly fall out of favour and are forgotten after their initial use.

This is being addressed by organisations such as Lumen (2020) who provide a consultation service to allow organisations to more effectively use OERs. The Open University (2020) has a long track record of providing such resources and guidance on their use.  

Access

The [de los Arcos] report refers to OERs as providing greater access to education.  There are two parts to this. Access to free courses and access to free resources.

There are fewer financial barriers to accessing further and higher education courses in Scotland due to Government funded places. However, not all learners are able to access these courses due to geography, family circumstances etc.

In these situations using an OER as a replacement for HE could be a better fit considering the student’s available time.  

Our ‘Open Learning’ provision is a commercial operation (despite the name this is more accurately Distance Learning with fees attached).  There is financial support for some of these courses via Individual Training Accounts (ITAs), (My World of Work, 2020) details how these funds can be accessed and by whom.

Although the uptake rate as shown in the report is low from OERs to formal courses this is not the aim of all of the learners undertaking such courses. A large percentage of the learners already have at least an undergraduate degree which seems to suggest that those engaged in an existing learning context are more likely to discover these courses.

Free access to resources is clearly useful to education establishments who have very tight budgets. Equally the open textbook idea is advantageous to students who would otherwise have to purchase several books for a single course.

Transition

As detailed in [de los Arcos] OERs can a bridge to formal education. Though the figures suggest that those undertaking free online courses are more likely to do more free study rather than formal courses.  

I felt the example of the student who had a poor experience at school was particularly interesting.  The Bridge to Success project referred by McAndrew and Farrow (2013) uses OERs created by the Open University in community colleges in the USA. The reverse is also stated to be the case where material from formal courses is released to be repurposed in informal settings.

I detailed a suggestion to my own organisation (in TMA01) to use OERs to create a course for students who have not yet enrolled. This will give us the opportunity to keep the student interested in their forthcoming course while determining their prior knowledge using diagnostic tests.

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References:

de los Arcos, B., Farrow, R., Perryman, L.-A., Pitt, R. and Weller, M. (2014), OER Evidence Report 2013–2014, OER Research Hub [Online]. Available at http://oerhub.net/ research-outputs/ reports/ (Accessed 24 March 2020).

Lumen (2020) How Do We Engage with Institutions?, Available at: https://lumenlearning.com/about/whats-oer/ (Accessed: 25th March 2020).

My World of Work (2020) SDS Individual Training Accounts (ITA), Available at: https://www.myworldofwork.co.uk/learn-and-train/sds-individual-training-accounts-ita (Accessed: 25th March 2020).

Open University (2017) Learning to (Re)Use Open Educational Resources , Available at: https://www.open.edu/openlearncreate/course/view.php?id=2500 (Last accessed: 2nd March 2020).

Wiley, D. (2010). Openness as catalyst for an educational reformation. Educause Review, 45(4), pp15–20. Available at: http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume45/OpennessasCatalystforanEducati/209246 Google Scholar (Accessed 24 March 2020).