be pursued, OER might well flood educational systems with cheaply available content – some good, some relevant, but much not – without doing anything to developing institutional capacity to deliver cost-effective, high quality educational programmes and courses.
Harnessed strategically, however, the concept of OER has tremendous potential to contribute to improving the quality and effectiveness of education. This potential revolves around three linked possibilities:
- Increased availability of high quality, relevant, need-targeted learning materials can contribute to more productive students and educators. Because OER removes restrictions around copying resources, it holds potential for reducing the cost of accessing educational materials. In many systems, royalty payments for textbooks and other educational materials constitute a significant proportion of the overall cost, while processes of procuring permission to use copyrighted material can also be very time-consuming and expensive (although some commentators have tended to overestimate the extent to which content is a cost driver in education by assuming that free content is almost synonymous with free education).
- The principle of allowing adaptation of materials provides one mechanism among many for constructing roles for students as active participants in educational processes who learn best by doing and creating, not by passively reading and absorbing. Content licences that encourage activity and creation by students through reuse and adaptation of that content can make a significant contribution to creating more effective learning environments.
- OER has the potential to build capacity by providing institutions and educators with access, at low or no cost, to the means of production with regard to high quality materials. This includes building institutions’ and educators’ competence in producing educational materials and completing the necessary instructional design to integrate such materials into high quality programmes of learning. Many educational systems are foundering because their employees have become so overwhelmed by administrative tasks that they have lost the time and space to exercise this critical creative capacity, and it will take time and investment to rebuild it. The concept of OER has potential to facilitate this if the process of developing educational materials is seen as being just as important as – and maybe more important than – the final product.
Problematically, though, many people in the 'OER movement' seem to assume that simply making content freely available for use and adaptation will improve educational delivery. This simplistic position ignores the obvious reality that content is only one piece of the educational puzzle, and that effective use of educational content demands, among other requirements, good educators to facilitate the process. Importantly, OER provides an opportunity to engage educational institutions and educators in structured processes that build capacity to design and deliver high quality higher educational programmes and courses
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