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.

I think there is a problem with this as sharing raises the 'if you publish an OER and no one uses it, is it shared?' You could argue that the sharing (via the license) is more explicit or easier with an OER, but it is eminently possible to create an OER and not realise you have. I use a lot of cc licensed Flickr pictures when making content - they probably weren't created as OER, or with even a knowledge of OER. Do they become OER when I use them? Difference is the license.

The argument over sharing as difference also raises questions over how well most repositories do "sharing" and if sharing is the goal then does that place a duty of care on the author to share "as much as is reasonable possible"? A lot of OER repositories are functionally poor when it comes to sharing - there is a paper on IRRODL by Atenas, Priego and Havemann on this. Short answer. Not very well.

And then you get to play the how good is OER metadata game. Short answer. Bad. Long answer. Baaaaad.

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

One problem here is that repositories don't make statistics available - MIT OCW does a monthly report but I've not seen another repository which does so regularly.

MOOC providers as commercial entities have a vested interest in making their usage data available (albeit cherry picked), so a statistical comparison is going to prove awkward.

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.

Am not sure the open licenses / metadata helps If the resources aren't indexable. All udacity videos are on YouTube, so are discoverable outside the course - not so Coursera or Futurelearn (unless posted elsewhere too - see sharing duty of care)

I saw some UKOER being reused in a Coursera MOOC, but the license was undetectable by indexers and the cc license attribution was text in a video - so again, hard to index.

However, if they are so completely designed, maybe the opportunities for re-use and re-purposing are very limited.

Depends on how you define reuse. Coursera courses have been reused as a whole as part of their business model allows universities to buy an existing MOOC module to use as part of their own provision. See Antioch Uni or Koç university. On English Common Law MOOC (developed by my Uni) several students from a Swedish Uni took our MOOC and that counted as credit for their degree.

I am wondering if there is a categorical difference between MOOCs and OER?

A MOOC could be a huge OER, and a an OER could be a MOOC. A MOOC could and has also contained OER. Crudely speaking you could say a MOOC is an OER with a forum. When OCW MIT had the open study fora for each piece of OCW you could say that wasn't a million miles away (ignoring the assessment part). How important is assessment for a MOOC? Early experiments with our MOOC data suggest almost as many people who take the final assessment have watched all the videos - as an alternative measure of completion.

So if they don't want assessment, do they just want OER?

I think OER, if you see it as sharing doesn't need to learn from MOOCs. Many OER have been used and accessed a lot more than a MOOC has. It also feels that MOOCs have been constructed as a weird lens to criticise OER as having failed. But this assumes every one in OER has the same agenda or goals? Which is? I don't make OER to disrupt or teach millions, I do it because making stuff available to others (to use unhindered) seems the right thing to do.

So effectively the criticism is OER aren't shared enough or the sharing approaches aren't working as well as they haves with MOOCs? Well, you can always share better.

Thanks for any thoughts on this!

Dominic