The weblog OERderves reports on the OER Review (pdf). The Feb. 2007 "Review of the Open Educational Resources Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities" is a report to the Hewlett Foundation (which has sponsored much of the development of OCW/OER sites and tools). The Review deserves to be widely read and discussed. The authors of the Review are Dan Atkins, John Seely Brown, and Allen Hammond; they offer many insightful summaries and perspectives but to my mind the most important recommendation they make is that the OER movement now move to a second stage with a focus on facilitating learning, not just the provision of resources for learning: "The OER initiative has been a vehicle for building a culture of sharing. We now propose that OER be leveraged within a broader initiative—an international Open Participatory Learning Infrastructure (OPLI) initiative ... for building a culture of learning." (P. 39.) In addition to the Review also examine, at OERderves, sixteen responses to the Review from such notables in the field as Stephen Downes and Tom Carey. _____JH
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Some sample statements from the Review:
"The goal of high quality has been achieved largely by supporting brandedcontent from well-established, high-reputation institutions. This is a reasonable starting point, but as we will discuss in later sections, in the future Hewlett needs to find additional mechanisms for vetting and enhancing educational objects in social settings, ways to close loops and converge to higher quality and more useful materials." (P. 11.)
"The starting point for OCW at MIT was a large, heterogeneous collection of faculty-produced and voluntarily contributed course material in diverse digital and non-digital formats. The .pdf file format was selected as the common denominator and continues to predominate. The choice of .pdf was the correct one at the time, but it needs to be re-examined. Use of .pdf limits the reuse of the material, especially a portion, or constituent objects, of a given document. Increased granularity of objects and increased accommodation of multimedia objects is desirable." (P. 30.)
"We are advocating investments to achieve more pervasive access to OER and are advocating an initiative aimed at deeper impact on learning. We advocate an initiative, building on OER, to create a global culture of learning. A culture of learning, or what some might call a learning ecosystem is targeted at preparing people for thriving in a rapidly evolving, knowledge-based world." (P. 39.)
"We are recommending that the Hewlett Foundation continue to nurture global open educational resources, but to do so on a larger and more diverse scale and in the context of an even bolder goal—to shape a new culture of learning that is now possible in the digital world. We believe that the Hewlett Foundation can play a leadership role in weaving the threads of an expanded OER movement; the e-science movement; the e-humanities movement; new forms of participation around Web 2.0; social software; virtualization; and multimode, multimedia documents into a transformative open participatory learning nfrastructure—the platform for a culture of learning. We are not recommending a direct assault on institutionalized higher education but rather establishing new alternatives to learning for more people in the world. Bold change at the edges of the formal education system, at all levels, will eventually propagate into and change the core." (P. 59.)
"Content was king, and open content we hope will be even more royal, butperhaps today the ruler is content + context. In the digital era we can start considering many different contexts in which learning will transpire. The learning-on-demand scenario has already transformed the need to spend all one’s time memorizing facts. Google becomes a living index and repository for enormous content. We now live in a world of abundance where editing and curating become more crucial than ever." (P. 69.)
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