 |
 |
Dear all
Good morning from sunny Hannover! I hope you don't mind, if I stretch your patience again with a new question. Last week I asked about the connection between RLO and OER.
It seemed that there might be general consensus: That RLO were a technical initiative to develop LO which could be shared in a similar way to the way open source programmed modules are shared and re-purposed by software engineers. Whereas OER are an initiative to enable people to share what they are using. To quote John Robertson: “If I was trying to capture the difference between RLOs and OERs in a sentence I’d say something like: People sharing what they’re doing [=OER] vs. people creating particular stuff to share [=RLO].” This doesn't seem to be a categorical difference, but a difference of degrees. Tavis Reddick suggests that the difference is between a technical component and a “ready-to-go” object.
Now I would like to ask you about the relationship between OER and MOOCs. However, I would not like to focus on differences in licencing practice, but on usability and impact.
As I see it, one of the recognised benefits of OER is related to their usability for others: The openness of OER should encourage other users to adopt, adapt and re-purpose the original OER for a new educational setting.
What little we know about reuse suggests that OER are often minimally adapted or re-purposed, but often adopted as an enhancement to a specific learning context. However, we know little about them, because of their inherent flexibility and we know even less about their impact on learning, because they are often only one element in a learning environment (e.g. OER as learning resource in a school classroom). When David Wiley criticised the lack of use of assessment instruments in conjunction with OER in 2011 (http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2042) one could also take this as a criticism that OER were often conceived of only as one small additional element in the whole learning environment.
So what about MOOCs? For these to work well, they have to be carefully designed as full learning environments with programmed content, interaction, assessment and user-data. If they are created using open licences (and meta-data) they can also be shared and re-mixed. However, if they are so completely designed, maybe the opportunities for re-use and re-purposing are very limited. Is this the revenge of the instructional designer, whose wings were clipped by OER? On the other hand, we are beginning to get great information on how MOOCs are being used: on communities of learners, spill-over of MOOCs to other learners (VOOCS), and on who joins and completes courses.
I am wondering if there is a categorical difference between MOOCs and OER? And if there is: what could OER perhaps learn from MOOCs? These questions would seem important because the attention of the media and indeed most policy-makers seems to have been grabbed by MOOCs to the possible detriment of further developments related to OER. (I know that this is less the case in the US Community College scene, but this is related to a very context-specific - although certainly not less important - textbook discussion.)
Thanks for any thoughts on this!