Bootstrapping a Culture of Sharing to Facilitate Open Educational Resources

Abstract

It seems self-evident that life for teachers would be simplified if there existed a large corpus of relevant resources that was available for them to reuse and for inquisitive students to download. The learning object community has worked for the past decade and more to provide the necessary infrastructure, standards, and specifications to facilitate such beneficial activity, but the take-up has been disappointingly small, particularly in University and Higher Education, which is the subject of this research. The problem has been that practitioners have not deposited their teaching resources, or have not made them openly available, in the quantity that would achieve critical mass for uptake. EdShare and the Language Box are two initiatives that have concentrated on the issue of facilitating and improving the practice of sharing, the former in an institutional setting and the latter in a subject community of practice. This paper describes and analyzes the motivations for these projects, the design decisions they took in implementing their repositories, the approaches they took to change agency and practice within their communities, and the changes, in practice, that have so far been observed. The contribution of this paper is an improved understanding of how to encourage educational communities to share.

Exploring the Barriers and Enablers to the Use of Open Educational Resources by University Academics in Africa

“…Educators were concerned that copyright claims may be laid against them for the use or reuse of material where the author of the material had not granted the necessary permissions (Davis, et al, 2010). To counter these copyright concerns, a licensing system called the Creative Commons (CC) was established by Larry Lessig andothers in 2001(Wiley &Gurrell, 2009).…”

“…For example, what was the feedback from learners who used this information, and was the quality of the content deemed to be of a high standard (Davis, et al, 2010)? Some initiatives have been started to assist in overcoming these issues.…”

A New Architecture for Cross-Repository Creation and Sharing of Educational Resources

“…In fact, if no permissions are granted or they are just unclear about a LO, this results in a scarce usage and diffusion. Such clear definition helped to remove any ambiguities in terms of right of use, remix, modify, redistribute [31] of the contents, with great benefit for the diffusion of freely available resources and LOs in particular, though in practice bootstrapping a culture of sharing to facilitate the creation of open educational resources is not easy [32].…”

Metodika tvorby a využití případových studií ve výuce a formou Open Educational Resources (OER)

“…• Neochota sdílet vlastní výukové materiály ze strany učitelů odráží obecnou nedůvěru v používání volně dostupných zdrojů i ze strany dalších účastníků publikačního a vzdělávacího procesu (Davis et al, 2010). Přestože je tedy informačně bohaté prostředí internetu dnes v mnoha oborech lidské činnosti nepostradatelné, je stále velkou pedagogickou výzvou naučit (se) v něm pracovat tak, aby výhody byly maximálně využity a nevýhody omezeny na minimum.…”