- As educational systems and institutions make strategic decisions to increase their levels of investment in design and development of better educational programmes, the most cost-effective way to do this is to embrace open licensing environments (for the reasons already mapped out, in the earlier sections of this Guide). Thus, commitment to OER implies increased investment in teaching and learning, but promises to increase the efficiency and productivity of those investments by harnessing new ways of developing better programmes, courses and materials.
- To be effective and sustainable, such strategic decisions will most likely need to be accompanied by review of institutional policies. Most importantly, institutions will need to review their policies pertaining to intellectual property (by ensuring that they support open licensing models) and staff remuneration and incentives (by ensuring that time spent on course design and development and other related activities is appropriately rewarded through salary increases and promotions, as part of broader policies covering staff remuneration and incentives).
To facilitate this, supportive policy environments – whether at a national or institutional level – are fundamental to any sustainable effort to harness the potential of OER.
Creating the conditions for success: The need for policy change
In developing curricula and learning resources, educators have always engaged with what is already available – often prescribing existing textbooks and creating reading lists of published articles for example. Even in distance education institutions with a long history of materials development, it is arguably a rare and strange occurrence to develop completely new materials with no reference to what already exists. The increasing availability of OER widens the scope of what is available, but, perhaps more importantly, opens greater possibility for adapting existing resources for a better fit with local contextual and cultural needs without the requirement to spend time in lengthy copyright negotiation processes or, failing that, to duplicate development of the same core content. This is usually most effectively and efficiently managed if educators work within a team in which disciplinary expertise is combined with expertise in content sourcing, learning design, resource development, materials licensing, and so on. If the new/ revised learning resources that emanate from such a process are then shared back with the wider higher education community as OER, the possibility exists for further engagement and refinement in the form of constructive feedback. The end result should be better curricula and better materials developed more quickly and renewed more often.
It should be clear that employment contracts with the various contributors to the development of new or revised learning resources – from whole programmes
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