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- Whilst there is no universal way of dealing with these issues, the reality is that incentives structures often reward individual, rather than collaborative, activity and encourage production of ‘new’ materials. While there are sometimes good reasons for a faculty member to develop materials from scratch, such processes may often duplicate ongoing work taking place in global knowledge networks that are engaged in facilitating increasingly creative forms of collaboration and sharing of information. The history of development of materials for distance education purposes illustrates clearly that, all other things being equal, collaboration by teams of people producing materials tends to produce higher quality results than individuals working in isolation.
- Consequently, it is opportune for educational institutions to think strategically about the extent to which their policies, practices, and institutional cultures reward individual endeavour over collaboration and create inefficiencies by prizing, in principle, creation of ‘new’ materials over adaptation and use of existing materials and content. As the amount of content freely accessible online proliferates, such approaches to procuring materials increasingly seem unnecessarily wasteful. Thus, there may be merit in ensuring that incentives structures and quality assurance processes make provision for judicious selection and use of existing content (particularly that which is openly licensed and hence free to procure), as well as development of new content.
- What is an appropriate starting point for initiating a sharing culture and encouraging movement towards OER publishing?
- Historically, educational institutions and educators have often been actively encouraged to protect their intellectual capital closely. Thus, sharing teaching practices, approaches, and materials will not necessarily be a common practice. Consequently, inviting colleagues to share materials with each other may be met with resistance and scepticism. Recognizing that this is an historical legacy of how education has tended to function, it is important to find ways to shift this culture, and to encourage ways of sharing materials that are not threatening to educators. One way that some institutions have begun this has been to encourage educators to share their lecture notes and/or slide shows used in particular courses online. In this way, they do not feel pressurized to develop full scale programmes – or the equivalent of a text book. Rather, they are sharing notes they create for their students, in a way that first benefits their current students – as they can access to the materials digitally – and then benefits colleagues in their own, and other institutions, as their notes may be used and adapted for other purposes. Lowering the expectation of what constitutes an OER – and not expecting the equivalent of textbooks to be available immediately – may be an important step towards shifting the culture of sharing in education.
- Similarly, institutions may require that all formal assessments for courses are published as OER. This would mean that a repository of tests, problems sets, assignments, essay questions, and examinations would be available under open
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