Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology

Beyond Availability
There have been increasing levels of discussion among OER producers, users, and re-users that having OER content available is simply not enough. In addition to being available content has to be useful, meaning that it is:
• Easily identified
• Consistently and transparently licensed
• Easily localized
• Easily shared
• Etc.

There is also a societal context as illustrated in the Cape Town Open Education Declaration in which the dialog is shifting from content to education: http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/read-the-declaration

Following this is serious discussion around institutional adoption of OSS and OER principles within the university, in effect creating a new university model. For example:
OCW Meta-University: http://www.usq.edu.au/electpub/e-jist/docs/vol10_no1/papers/full_papers/taylorj.htm

Doing OER
Much of the work and discussion around Open Educational Resources has been about content and licensing, but there has been a growing dialog around the use and creation of OER as a generative learning process that has been identified in terms of “Doing OER.”

Amee Godwin of OER Commons suggests that the impact of OER will be most profound as it influences models of collaboration and teaching among learners and communities of teachers.

She recently wrote a short piece titled On Doing OER on Terra Incognita: http://blog.worldcampus.psu.edu/

Open Source Learning (OER & OSS Mashup)

• Learning Design: The core elements of a learning design are a series of activities that include details about the intended experience.

• Specific Meaning of Learning Design: Learning Design refers to a specific body of recent technical work that attempts to describe how software can “run” a sequence of learning activities.

• Open Source Teaching: If Learning Design describes the education process, we can think of them as the “source code” of teaching. If teachers then share their designs under Open Content licenses, this might represent of Open Source Teaching. Associating OER with a LD, couples OSS and OER in a meaningful and contextually relevant way.

James Dalziel explored this topic in a posting titled Learning Design and Open Source Teaching:
http://blog.worldcampus.psu.edu/index.php/2007/05/16/learning-design-and-open-source-teaching/