Open Educational Resources – a historical perspective
David Kernohan and Amber Thomas (JISC), October 2012
Executive Summary
This document constitutes a limited international history of work directed at the sharing of learning resources. In order to develop a coherent narrative, we have constrained our research to:
· Focusing on policy rather than technical approaches
· Not attempting to be exhaustive – looking at exemplars rather than trying to cover every project in this area.
· Concentrating specifically on Higher Education, rather than other educational sectors.
· Paying particular attention to the way in which international movements have affected the UK.
The aim of this document is to provide a context into which discussions around future HEFCE-supported OER work can be put. Many members of the steering group will have been involved in elements of the work that is described here, and could likely add further detail to many aspects of the paper. But we were unable to find any earlier work that tells the full story of this policy area, from the early eighties to the present day.
We have drawn particularly on five key previous reports, all of which would serve as useful further reading and are available freely online.
· OECD, “Sharing knowledge for free[1]” (2007)
· CETIS, “Opportunities and challenges for higher education[2]”. (2008)
· Ithaka, “Unlocking the Gates[3]” (2011)
· Hewlett Foundation, “Review of the OER Movement[4]” (2007)
· JISC, “Good Intentions[5]” (2008)
This report also builds on numerous reports, policy documents and blog posts. We have included links to key resources as footnotes. And we have drawn extensively on our range of contacts and personal knowledge.
Contents
Open Educational Resources – a historical perspective 1
Executive Summary 1
Introduction 2
Before OER – 1982-2002 3
Re-useable Learning Objects 6
2002 - The birth of “big” OER 8
OCW goes global (2002-2009) 10
2009 and onwards – the Higher Education Bubble 12
OER reflects 14
The MOOC boom 15
Where do we go from here? 16
Introduction
This paper primarily attempts to do two things – firstly to describe the nature and evolution of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement worldwide, and secondly to highlight the place of the UK within it. It also touches on linked activity around open education more widely. What we are aiming to demonstrate is the contribution of UK OER activity: what it has taken from earlier work worldwide and what it has added to the sum of global knowledge in the area. It is aimed at policy makers and researchers working in the area of OER, sharing learning materials and open education.
OER is most usually defined via the OECD (2002) formulation:
“Open Education Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others.” [6]
However, this definition limits discussion to work that has been released since a more nuanced understanding of the possibilities of licensing became widespread, particularly since the birth of Creative Commons in 2002 (with the release of the version 1.0 licenses). For the purposes of this paper we will examine more generally the production and release of materials designed for reuse in an educational setting.
Before OER – 1982-2002
It is likely that as long as teachers have used learning resources in the classroom, there have been both opportunities to increase the quality of resources and pressures to rationalise spending by sharing these across teachers. But, significantly, the sharing of digital resources has – almost since the dawn of mass computing - always been a key concern amongst educational funders, and in order to start this story somewhere, we will start in the UK in 1982.
The “Nelson Review[7]” was produced by a working group commissioned by the Computer Board (a forerunner of JISC), and examined the use of computers in university teaching in the UK and internationally. From observations throughout 1982 and 1983, the report concluded that the UK lagged behind competitor nations in the effective use of IT to support learning. The most notable recommendations concerned the ratio of computers to students in UK universities, and set an ambitious benchmark of one computer between every three students. Alongside this, the report pressed for central funding to support the implementation of IT-enhanced learning practices, and the sharing of expertise and resources.
In response, the University Grants Commission (UGC) launched the Computers In Teaching (CTI) initiative, which aimed to:
· “evaluate the educational potential of IT in university teaching
· raise the level of awareness of IT among academics and students
· promote the development of computer-mediated training and learning[8]”
The CTI projects were based around subject areas, and aimed to share disciplinary practice in technology-supported learning. Via the medium of newsletters, events, personal contact and the nascent pre-web internet they build up networks of contacts across institutions and disseminated guidance and practice.
It is important to note that this was deliberately a national initiative, aimed at increasing the capacity of the sector. And this was substantially before the accepted invention of the world wide web at CERN in 1989, and even before the consolidation of JaNET’s initial widespread x.25-based network in 1984. National initiatives have played a large part in UK attitudes to learning materials, and in generating the widespread dream that academics sharing materials will lead to both improved teaching quality and efficiency saving.
At the turn of the century the final phase of CTI projects became, along with the Technology in Teaching and Learning Support Network (TLTSN), the Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN) – which was aimed explicitly at sharing practice and materials. This was a first notable case of work on IT supported learning informing the enhancement of general teaching practice As Cliff Allen (former LTSN director) commented in the Times Higher Education Supplement:
“The "not invented here" syndrome has prevailed for too long, and we can no longer afford to continue to spurn practices and developments conceived in other institutions or subjects that are clearly transferable.”[9]
The LTSN sprang from the recommendations of the 1996 Dearing Report[10], which argued more generally for an enhancement of the status of teaching. Dearing also noted in passing that:
“We are also aware that students will need access to high quality networked desktop computers that permit the use of the latest multi-media teaching materials and other applications.”
The LTSN drew together and shared a range of resources created by other nationally funded programmes, such as the Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning (FDTL) and the Teaching and Learning Technology Programme. These, along with early JISC programmes such as the Learning and Teaching (5/99) Programme, had an explicit focus on improving quality and making efficiency savings by sharing learning materials. For instance, 5/99:
“arose from a need to integrate learning environments with the wider information landscape aimed at increasing the use of online electronic resources”[11]
FDTL was directly concerned with:
“encourage[ing] the dissemination of good teaching and learning practice across the higher education sector.”[12]
and the TLTP interim evaluation was explicit that:
“Transportability of courseware was enhanced when the use of technology was relatively unsophisticated, intended to support and complement teachers and tutors rather than to offer a substitute. For more interactive and embedded courseware also to be transferable there would be a need for more shared curricula across HEIs. The tendency for TLTP projects to concentrate on first year courses, where introductory material is more likely to be common, supports this judgement.”[13]
However, at this stage these materials were not “open” in the sense that we would understand. There was a general expectation that projects, having been supported in developing materials, would be permitted to charge users of these materials as a means of sustainable practice. Again, the interim evaluation is clear on this point:
“Whilst accepting the principle that the courseware produced through TLTP should be free to all HEIs within the UK, we believe that this approach has not proved conducive to effective dissemination. This approach appears to have dampened the desire of a number of projects to put much effort into dissemination in the UK because there would be few returns to the investment. Many of our interviewees have questioned how the product can be maintained in the long term without being able to charge for it.”
Similar assumptions were built in to FDTL (and even CETL, “HEIs should endeavour to fully recover their costs “[14]) project conditions – all of which demonstrated the tension between seeing digital learning resources as a means of commercial institutional revenue generation and as a spur to sector-wide efficiency savings. This tension – which still persists around policy-making circles ten years later – could also be seen internationally.
However, if these programmes are seen primarily as quality improvement initiatives, it can be argued that the realisation of value created within the materials themselves are a means of covering programme costs. Though historically (as above) this could be seen as a commercial realisation, recent policy in this area has focused on realisation via impact on quality improvement metrics.
In 1997 the international MERLOT consortium[15] built on earlier US DARPA-sponsored work to develop a platform for the sharing of educational resources focusing on a peer review model of quality assurance, similar to the way in which journals work in research. And in 1999 at Rice University Connexions[16] was an early international example of a more sharing-driven approach to digital learning. Based around an online content management system with accompanying metadata requirements, Connexions remains global, cross-sector and largely community led.
These could be contrasted with other contemporary approaches, such as Fathom[17], a consortium of “prestige” universities and museums led by the University of Columbia. The Fathom approach was closer to a traditional publishing model, with online courses and materials offered for sale. There were many parallel instances, and there remain huge numbers, of courses being sold online (for a historic example in UK, see the eUniversity project[18]), but Fathom was unique in explicitly selling learning materials to the general public[19]
Re-useable Learning Objects
Concurrently, the work of David Wiley and others gave a “learning design” framework to the policy goal of sharing and reusing “learning objects”. In his 2000 book, “Reusability”[20], he compared the practice (with substantial caveats) to LEGO, and also to atoms as the building blocks of all matter. The thinking behind this approach - the idea that learning materials are taken from many places and combined by an educator for use by the learner - was drawn from a wide range of technical and pedagogic research which has underpinned much of the concurrent and subsequent initiatives around the digital sharing of learning materials.
“Reusable Learning Objects” (RLOs) were, in the early years of this century, a response to some of the policy pressures and theoretical speculation around sharing digital learning materials. More so than OER (which is a very general category), an RLO implied a resource that was designed with a particular technical (as well as pedagogic) use in mind. The term arose from a 1996 working group led by Wayne Hodgins at CeDMA, the concept built on extrapolations from object orientated (modular) approaches to computer programming.
RLO initiatives were characterised by the need for adherence to learning object interoperability standards, including IEEE 1484.12, SCORM, various IMS standards, and the Dublin Core metadata schema. These standards allow for various levels of compatibility with the many virtual learning environments (VLEs) that were becoming widely used at the time – with the understanding that “modules” of learning could be plugged in to an environment and hence a course. Indeed, it was seriously postulated in many places that the selection and integration of learning objects into courses could be entirely automated.
Whilst perhaps not approaching the wilder reaches of thinking in this area, the JISC X4L[21] programme, commencing in 2002, was an excellent example of a concerted attempt to realise the RLO dream. Its aims were to:
· “use and develop the best available tools to explore whether repurposing content can become a popular, sustainable way of producing e-learning materials for the future; ‘
· increase the numbers of people in institutions with the necessary skills to repurpose learning objects;
· expose and begin to tackle the challenges associated with repurposing learning objects; and
· begin to populate a national repository with learning materials as well as case studies and exemplars showing how these have been achieved.”
The X4L programme created a national repository (Jorum), a content packaging tool (Reload) and a cluster of projects creating and sharing reusable learning resources. Jorum is worth highlighting as a visible facet of the “learning object repository” movement. Repositories (either individually or as federated groups) serve as a single searchable destination for the deposit and retrieval of learning materials and are unquestioningly valuable as a means of archival and storage, but as spurs to sharing have struggled to make a case for viability against the intelligent and informed use of mainstream search engines and – latterly - social medial hosting. The e-prints software developed by Southampton University with JISC funding branched into a series of projects that placed strong emphasis on the social aspect of sharing. Projects like LORO[22], Humbox[23] and Kultivate have used the EdShare[24] software for a range of discipline areas, and combined repository functionality with the ethos of open practice.
In many ways X4L defined the way that JISC and partners would deliver programmes aimed at systemic cultural change in the future. But the programme evaluation[25] was clear that significant barriers around the sharing and reuse of RLOs remained:
“X4L has demonstrated that the principal benefits of reuse and repurposing are generally understood and accepted in the communities involved in the programme. However, the concept of reusable learning objects is still not proven or generally accepted in mainstream practice across the FE and HE sectors. That said, X4L has identified and explored many of the key barriers to reuse and repurposing, including the pressures of time and resource constraints on staff, concerns about professional integrity and academic independence, cultural resistance to sharing, and tensions between community collaboration and institutional competition.”