Week 2 - Activity 7: Exploring OER issues

Activity 7: Exploring OER issues
What I perceive as the three key issues in OER, and how these are being addressed.

I identify my three key issues from the perspective of creating and using OER within an English language overseas international school context. From the short literature review I undertook my focus has always been on how I and my colleagues would make use of OER and under what circumstances would we be able to contribute to the OER movement (D’Antoni 2009).

Cost, in terms of time and ultimately money is the first main issue. On the one hand the literature states that creating and sharing the resources is a minimal expense, for example Caswell et all state “At little or no cost universities can make their content available to millions” (Caswell et al 2008, p.1). The job of creating OER can be integrated into a faculty workload, passed on to a media center employee (if a school has one) or most successfully accomplished by a dedicated employee (Caswell et al 2008). So then, on the other hand someone must be paid to do this work. In my international school experience, working at for profit and non-profit schools, the board does not employ staff unless they see a tangible benefit (bodies in front of kids) to the school. The time necessary to create the OER, learning and meeting the OER standard(s) used is a luxury unavailable to teaching staff in international schools. As Wilson et al reported, in their study of five institutions, one participant reported that she lacked the time to adapt OER (Wilson et al 2009, p.10) let alone, in my opinion, create new resources. An issue also mentioned by other participants of the study. Indeed the paper alludes to the delay in gaining replies from the five participants stating that they “were contacted at a busy time {mid way) in the academic year” (p.11). Given that international educators have perhaps four non-contact periods per week, one must question where they would find the time to embark on an OER endeavor without the support of their school.

Caswell et al. 2008 asserts that we have a “moral obligation” (p. 8) to create OER and Wiley (2006, cited by Caswell et al. p. 7) states that there is a “moral imperative” and how can we “in good conscience allow this poverty of education” to continue. The simple answer is that for international schools, the owner and accountant look at the bottom line figure and if any innovation does not increase the profit, or worse costs money, then altruism be dammed. It has been argued that the marketing gain from creating OER can offset the costs, which may be true at university level, but not so for a successful and full school.

Assuming OER use and creation take place. Maintaining the momentum and sustainability of the project are major issues. A key concern is the turnover of staff, on average every 2 to 4 years, on the international school circuit. Staff will not invest their own personal time and energy into an OER project when they know they will not see it through to fruition. Of course, “Open” implies geographical boundaries should not impede an OER development.  

There is scope and opportunity to use OER in Secondary Education. For example, recommending MOOCs and OER courses to secondary students as supplementary resources to be accessed outside of school (Wilson et al. 2009). Cherry picking content and including extra content when necessary, as three out of the five participants indicated (Wilson et al. 2009, Figure 4, p. 9) is an option. An example of this was when I introduced programming and Java to an IB Computer Science class by having them complete the first seven lectures and assignments from the Stanford CS106A Programming Methodology course (Stanford 2013). Due to the high level and fast pace of the introductory material, I created extra in-between assignments, and broke down the reading requirements in to secondary level manageable sections.

My International secondary school is beginning to make use of OER however I am unaware of, and doubt that, staff at my school and similar establishments will heed their moral imperative and begin creating OER, likewise the institutions will only  support this movement if it immediately profits them to do so.

Words: 694

References

CALVERLEY, G. AND SHEPHARD, K. 2003. ‘Assisting the uptake of on-line resources: why good learning resources are not enough’, Computers and Education, Vol. 41, pp.205–224.

CASWELL, T., HENSON, S., JENSEN, M., WILEY, D. 2008. Open educational resources: Enabling universal education. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 9(1), 1–4. 

D’ANTONI, S.  2009. Open Educational Resources: reviewing initiatives and issues, Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning, 24:1, 3-1. Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02680510802625443 [Accessed 30 March 2013]

STANFORD CS106A. Stanford University, USA. Stanford CS106A: Programming Methodology. Available from http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs106a/index.html [Accessed 30 March 2013]

WILSON, T. AND MCANDREW, P. 2009. Evaluating how five higher education institutions worldwide plan to use and adapt open educational resources' Proceedings of INTED2009 Conference. 9-11 March 2009, Valencia, Spain. ISBN:978-84-612-7578-6.

(Badge: OER understanding applied for)