"Taking OER beyond the OER Community: Policy and Capacity" September 23, 2010

Welcome to this, the first of three online discussion forums to take place
over the next few months.  The theme for this forum is "Taking OER beyond
the OER Community: Policy and Capacity".

Discussants have been invited to prepare short papers to address some of the
pertinent issues.  Neil Butcher is the first of our discussants.  His bio
and a synopsis of his discussion paper are attached to this message.  The
synopsis also appears below this introductory message.

We invite you to participate over the coming week.  A reminder that this
discussion will continue until midnight (SAST) Wednesday 29 September  2010.

Kind regards

Mike Chiles (Forum Moderator), Trudi van Wyk (COL), Patricia Schlicht (COL), Zeynep Varoglu (UNESCO)

------------ Synopsis of invited paper ------------

Please refer to
http://oerworkshop.weebly.com/forum-1-23---29-september-2010.html for the
full paper

In an invited paper prepared for this discussion forum, Neil Butcher
addresses the following two key questions:

.          What structures, processes and financial grants need to be in
place at tertiary institutions to support the development and curation of
OERs?

.          How can I stay in control of the process of my educational
content being shared?

Open licensing frameworks pose a number of economic propositions. The sale
of educational content is an industry in decline as a wave of free sharing
of content builds.  What is happening in the music, film, and newspaper
industries can be compared with the future of the educational publishing
industry. Neil contends that the market for educational content will not
disappear altogether but that it will be comprehensively transformed and
different services will need to be created within those transformed markets.

According to Neil, the more useful the content is to students, the more
likely it is to be shared, with or without the author's permission.  So
academics who ask 'why should I share my educational content?' should be
aware that the real question they should be asking is 'how can I stay in
control of the process of my educational content being shared?'  Neil
suggests that like the music industry fighting music pirates, the harder one
tries to destroy the leaders of these decentralized movements, the more one
ends up strengthening them.

On the teaching and learning side there is every reason to believe that
universities that succeed economically will do so predominantly by
understanding that their real potential educational value lies in their
ability to provide effective support to students and in their ability to
provide intelligent assessment and critical feedback to students on their
performance. The market has not shifted fully yet, but it will and tertiary
institutions that release their content as OER reflect an understanding of
this shift, as well as an effort to lead it and benefit from the publicity
that such leadership generates.  Increasingly, people who seek to
ring-fence, protect, and hide their educational content and research will
most likely place limits on their academic careers. They will also
increasingly be excluded from opportunities to improve their teaching
practice and domain-specific knowledge by sharing and collaborating with
growing networks of academics around the world.

The concept of OER itself provides a reason to change institutional and
national policies and budgetary frameworks so that they reward collaboration
and open sharing of knowledge, rather than either penalizing it or ignoring
it. There is a need to place strong emphasis on institutional policy
engagement as currently there is little prospect of persuading people to
change their behaviour. The simple reality is that good education cannot be
created or sustained without spending properly on it. Investment in
education can only ever be meaningfully justified in terms of the long-term
social and economic benefits that it will bring societies, not in terms of
how those investments will help to enrol more students at progressively
declining unit costs.

The key issues of relevance when considering the potential applications of
OER can consequently be summarized as follows:

1)      Universities that are serious about teaching and learning will need
to ensure that spending on personnel and other related expenses reflects a
sustained institutional effort to invest in creating more effective teaching
and learning environments for their students.

2)      As universities make strategic decisions to increase their levels of
investments in design and development of better educational programmes, the
most cost-effective way to do this is to embrace open licensing
environments.

3)      To be effective and sustainable, such strategic decisions will
likely need to be accompanied by review of institutional policies. Most
importantly, institutions will need to review their policies pertaining to
intellectual property and staff remuneration and incentives.

In closing Neil extends an invitation to us to share thoughts on the
following:

1)      Do you agree with Neil's analysis of the economic changes taking
place in higher education as a result of the increasingly open availability
of educational content?

2)      Based on your answer to question 1, what implications do you think
this has for the institution at which you are working?