Addressing the Technical Challenges of Open Educational Resources

Abstract

As open educational resources (OER) becomes a more established concept, its growth and continued success not only center around the creation of new content but also depend upon the development and evolution of existing content, licenses permitting. The evolution of and persistent access to existing content requires easily editable works and the ability to download local copies of OER files so that no technical limitations hinder what the license permits. Such measures as text files, OpenDocument formats, and version control present a way to keep OER content editable and shareable, in compliance with licenses. Librarians are uniquely positioned to help users understand those solutions.

A Qualitative Study on the Digital Preservation of OER

“…Librarian Steven Ovadia holds that "a work's license can decree the work reusable, but if there is no software to open it, the work is not actually reusable in practice." 41 This is an important reminder for librarians collaborating with instructors to make and adapt OER. Librarians have a responsibility to thoughtfully audit, select, describe, and preserve OER that hold significant value for the teaching and learning missions of our institutions.…”

“…23 Librarian Steven Ovadia's 2019 article on the technical constraints users experience when enacting the 5R permissions builds upon the ALMS framework, recommending that creators adopt several open source software practices, including using markdown and distributed version control. 24 Similarly, the Open Textbook Network's "Modifying an Open Textbook: What You Need to Know" provides an important discussion on the software needed to edit specific file formats, asking creators to think about longevity and downstream use as part of their creation process. 25…”

“…Academic librarian and technology expert Steven Ovadia's guidance on using Markdown or text files might be useful in this endeavour. 38 Interviewee 1 highlighted this idea of owning one's expertise well: "I think we just need to start seeing all of these digital pieces as our responsibility… [T]his is literally our area of expertise, and we would never go to [instructors] In short, when librarians hesitate to require faculty to plan for preservation, either through identifying acceptable file formats or by requiring that a librarian is embedded in the creation process, we do a disservice to our professional expertise and to the longevity of the OER created. Before figuring out the details of what OER libraries will preserve or how, administrators must decide that preservation of OER is important and librarians must recognize that their professional expertise can inform the creation process.…”

Building capacity through open approaches: Lessons from developing undergraduate electrophysiology practicals

“…Once we had final versions of the master documents, these were uploaded to a public repository on GitHub ( github.com/emckiernan/electrophys ), along with images, data, and code associated with each practical. GitHub provides Git version control 57 , 58 , which means OERs can continue to evolve as necessary while preserving the history of resource development 59 . GitHub also provides collaboration features, which we hope students and educators will use to improve and customize these materials.…”

Open educational resources in public administration: a case study in Greece

“…Nevertheless, various challenges and barriers still hinder the wider adoption of OER, with a significant impact both on the producers of OER, as well as on those who wish to find, reuse and adapt OER. More specifically, there is still considerable room for improvement in the ways OER are created and published online, as this can be a tedious, time-consuming and expensive process (Coughlan et al, 2019;Ovadia, 2019). Similar challenges apply to the discoverability, reusability and openness of learning materials, as content creators still face considerable difficulties in finding suitable and high-quality OER that they can reuse and repurpose in a cost-efficient way (Gaskell & Mills, 2014;Kaatrakoski et al, 2017;Luo et al, 2020).…”