knowledge for all. how open educational resources challenge the value-added model of higher...

KNOWLEDGE FOR ALL. HOW OPEN EDUCATIONAL

RESOURCES CHALLENGE THE VALUE-

ADDED MODEL OF HIGHER EDUCATION

Dirk Van Damme

Head of the Innovation and Measuring Progress Division –

OECD/EDU

MIT OpenCourseware

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OER

• “Digital learning resources offered online (although sometimes in print) freely and openly to teachers, educators, students and independent learners in order to be used, shared, combined, adapted, and expanded in teaching, learning and research. They include learning content, software tools to develop, use and distribute, as well as implementation resources such as open licences.” (UNESCO)

OER

• “OER are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. An open license is one that allows anyone to access, reuse, modify and share the OER.” (Hewlett Foundation)

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OER

• Educational resources that are freely available for use by educators and learners are growing and increasingly used– Increasingly digitised content materials (learning

objects), such as texts, simulations, images, videos to complete courses

– Available for learners, but also usable in formal education

– Linked to other developments in ‘openness’, such as open source software, open access publishing, and new approaches to collaborative flexible learning

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The OER community & movement

• MIT OpenCourseWare project (2001)• UNESCO (2002)• William and Flora Hewlett Foundation• OpenCourseware Consortium• Berlin and Cape Town Declarations• Open Universities• CERI, Knowledge for Free (2007)• Global Knowledge Sharing Initiative, the White

House Office of Science and Technology Policy• UNESCO-COL Guidelines (2011)

Recent developments

• From content-only resources to full learning objects

• Including also forms of assessment• And certification: ‘digital badges’

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Benefits & risks

• The potential benefits for public education are huge:– Improving access of underprivileged learners to

quality resources– Reducing cost of developing learning materials– Improvement of quality, diversity and richness of

learning resources in formal education– Innovating learning practices in formal education– Raising effectiveness of post-secondary education– Fostering lifelong learning and connecting formal

and informal learning

Benefits & risks

• But are also some risks, which probably ask for national and international policies:– Quality (assurance) of OER’s– Language, geographical and cultural bias– Unbalanced streams of OER’s between

developed and emerging countries– Sustainability of business models in developing

OER– Interoperability issues: users may find it difficult

to locate, download, adapt and use regardless of platforms

Benefits & risks

• For a long time, appropriate intellectual property licensing was an area with a lot of confusion, but recently the Creative Commons licenses are recognised as excellent and most widely used– CC BY: the most open, allows to freely distribute, remix,

modify, even commercially, as long as initial creator is credited for

– CC BY-SA: idem, but new versions need to be licensed as original

– CC BY-ND: original can not be changed– Three other variants– Each license exists in 3 formats: legal, human readable,

machine readable

Benefits

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Open and flexible learning opportunities

Efficiency and quality of learning resources

Cost-efficiency

Innovation

Systemic transformative capacity

Language and cultural sensitivity

Connectivity

Quality

Copyright and licensing

Sustainability

Challenges

OER activity

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Education level with OER activity

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Relevance of benefits

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Relevance of challenges

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OER policy strategies

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Strategic issues for HE

• Integrating OERs in the institutional processes of teaching and learning can probably help to improve quality and relevance and to connect the institution better with state-of-the-art knowledge in a networked, globalised community, right?

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Strategic issues for HE

• Private cost of HE is rapidly increasing, but what are students exactly paying for? If content knowledge is no longer defining the unique selling proposition of higher education institutions, how should their added value be identified and marketed? Is a high private cost sustainable when more and more resources and even parts of the educational process are freely available?

Strategic issues for HE

• Is it thinkable that individual portfolios of skills assessments and digital badges can become a more trustworthy alternative for employers than institutional qualifications?

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Thank you !

dirk.vandamme@oecd.orgwww.oecd.org/edu/ceri

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