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Toward an Open Educational Resources Initiative at Penn State

March 29, 2008 - 10:36am — nfh102
Dutton Institute has an OER initiative in place. We're looking at the official Penn State policy on courseware - the PSU lawyers have had their say making the policy more OER-friendly. David shows us his openly published textbook. There is a copyright agreement form available that will allow faculty members to open their content. Opening content can make PSU more competitive in an OER world - prospective students will have the chance to evaluate course quality. The value of being a tuition paying student is the collaboration with faculty, faculty evaluation and the credential offered. Dave's takeway - we can do this and we should, from a business point of view and from the pov of the university's mission.

Keith brings up challenges - standards, faculty buy-in

Ken elaborates more on the challenge of licensing/standards - PSU has not adopted the Creative Commons non-commercial use license, which would be ideal since it is universally understood. Part of the dialog around OER is around how to reach the 99% of the world that can't afford Penn State - what value can our OER have for them. Also the value of remixing as introduced in Lessig's talk - Universities and scholars collaborating can add to the collective knowledge. Learning design is the code, OER is the material, the two together make a rich educational experience.

Question about quality control of the content - what if it's lousy and students or prospective students are turned off.

Also a point about content getting stale - who has access to change/comment on OER, here's an argument for the complete democratization of the process. Keith adds that findability and aggregation are key.

Ken wraps up with some challenges to the way we do things - we need to move away from viewing educational resources from strictly a production model, instead view it as an organic, always-changing process.

Another challenge comes up from an attendee - what about courses that use protected journal? David responds that the scholarly community as a whole is moving towards a more open model, publishing more and more in open journals.

Open Student.org - a student focused OER resource!!

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March 31, 2008 - 3:58pm — nfh102

Further thoughts

One key takeaway for me in this session, which I did not communicate well in the above live-blogged post, is that securing faculty buy-in requires explaining OER from both a business and an outreach (University mission) viewpoint. Looking at the idea of opening content from a strictly business perspective is probably not adequate in my opinion - after all, we can easily share only small pieces of courseware (syllabus, first lesson, etc.) as a way of sufficiently enticing prospective students. Look at the Amazon model in which a book's TOC and a sample of text is often provided to entice buyers. The outreach mission is the bigger impetus to really making OER happen.