Weel 3 - Activity 11: The advantages and disadvantages of big and little OER

• From the list below, either read the chapter or view the slidecast:
  • Weller (2011b), Public engagement as collateral damage  (chapter).
  • Weller (2011a), Academic output as collateral damage  (slidecast).
• Write a blog post of less than 500 words on the benefits and drawbacks of big and little OER approaches. Remember to tag your post with #h817open.

Notes
I have been falling quite far behind on this due to holiday time. Still, can get back into it now.
I watched the slidecast but found the audio levels very low (one of the drawbacks of little OER). I followed up on some of the links, including watching a weird video of Martin Weller talking to his future self, with beard and pipe.

1. Benefits of big OER approaches.

• Looks professional is professional - set's a standard
• Big OER is planned, specified, designed, implemented, tested. 3rd party content removed and replaced.
• The OER should be 100 legal
• More comprehensive content and robust support systems (for example, system remembers all your past quizzes, and where you are in the OER. Maybe making suggestions for what to look at next).
• A professional (experts?) collaborative OER should in theory lack errors and biases that may be inherent in a single (little) OER.
• Interactive
• One Big OER probably leads on to another relevant OER in a sequence
• More likely to be known and/or recognized as an expert source of data/knowledge/information
• Markets the institution that created it

2. Drawbacks of big OER approaches.

• Content of OER may contain more than the user wants or requires, thereby taking the user time to locate and focus upon their required OER from the provided.
• Geared towards a big audience and therefore less "personal" in the perceived approach/content/delivery method.

3. Benefits of little OER approaches.

• Quick to do. No need to discuss with a team if it is just you creating the resource
• Can be aimed at a specific niche audience
• Cheap/free to do
• Supposedly specialist skills not required.
• Maybe possible to find OER content specific to a very narrow field

4. Drawbacks of little OER approaches.

• Marketing it - Making the public aware of its existence
• Need some technical skills - not only to make the resource but also to share it and manage them/it. (E.g. this slideshare, 2,773 views, with very low level audio level making it hard to hear without external amplification or headphones).
• Lacks quality control - e.g. hard to read black text due to background colour/image
• Usually a single simple resource (podcast, slideshare). No integration of multiple resources.
• Less interactive courses/content
• A single person resource could have errors or biases in their resource
• Is the OER 100% legal, no copied images, all content allowed to be shared? No time or possibly motivation to remove or cite all sources within little OER
• Lack of peer review of content can lead to a poor quality little OER