Knowledge should be free

Posted on | May 28, 2007 | Comments Off

Another visit to the website of the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) brought me to a newly published OECD paper with the intriguing title, “Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources”.

This biggish document (153 pages) is the outcome of a study by an international group whose work was funded by the Hewlett Foundation. Its starting point is the Open Educational Resource (OER) Movement (there’s a very good summary of the achievements of OER on Stephen Downes’ blog) and it addresses 4 key questions:

- How can sustainable cost/benefit models for OER initiatives be developed?
- What are the intellectual property rights issues linked to OER initiatives?
- What are the incentives and barriers for universities and faculty staff to deliver their materials to OER initiatives?
- How can access and usefulness for the users of OER initiatives be improved?

While its key audience is higher education, the authors feel that many of the issues raised are of equal importance to the school sector.

Given the size of the paper, I have only really been able to dip into it so far, but as a starting point, some lines from the Executive Summary are worth repeating here:

“OER is not only a fascinating technological development and potentially a major educational tool. It accelerates the blurring of formal and informal learning, and of educational and broader cultural activities. It raises basic philosophical issues to do with the nature of ownership, with the validation of knowledge and with concepts such as altruism and collective goods. It reaches into issues of property and its distribution across the globe. It offers the prospect of a radically new approach to the sharing of knowledge, at a time when effective use of knowledge is seen more and more as the key to economic success, for both individuals and nations.”

And no one will be surprised by at least one of the man conclusions of the report, that:

“….the existing copyright regime is probably the most serious barrier to faster growth of the OER movement and possibly to the use of information technology in education generally.”

The paper notes that the concept of Creative Commons has much to offer here, since authors of material can choose to retain some rights while giving free access to their work under agreed conditions.

The authors also note that, while most OER projects are set up in developed countries, it is increasingly a global phenomenon. In the light of some of my own recent concerns, it would be good to think that OER might become one of the means by which the developing and emerging nations of the world could enhance and expand their access to high quality learning resources over the next few years.

Another interesting consequence of OER is that students in higher education are increasingly able to compare the quality of the curriculum they are being exposed to at institutional level with the thousands of open-courseware (OCW) programmes made available for free on the Web from higher education institutions of high repute from all over the world – this has inevitable effects on pedagogy, given that teachers can no longer simply present themselves as the ’sage on the stage’ but rather need to become the ‘guide on the side’. Students can make use of material from other institutions either to complement what they get locally, or indeed to replace it!

I read on……

Technorati Tags: oecd, ceri, oer, ocw