Presentation on the EADI IMWG conference Antwerpen, Belgium, September, 13 2012.

1. Open Educational Resources
An Introduction
Robert Schuwer and Fred Mulder
Open Universiteit (Netherlands)
EADI IMWG Antwerpen
13 september 2012

2. Who am I?
• Robert Schuwer
• Open Universiteit (Netherlands)
• Background in mathematics and computer science
• Since 2006 involved with projects on open educational
resources
• Chair of the Dutch SURF Special Interest Group OER
(http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=3681051)
Page 2

3. What are Open Educational Resources?
• Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning
or research materials that are in the public domain or
released with an intellectual property license that allows for
free use, adaptation, and distribution. (UNESCO, 2002)
• David Wiley (2007): 4 R’s
– Reuse – copy verbatim
– Redistribute – share with others
– Revise – adapt and edit
– Remix – combine with others

4. History (1)
• 2001 MIT
• 2002 UNESCO congress in Paris
– Coined the term OER
• 2006 Open Courseware Consortium
– The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of higher
education institutions and associated organizations from
around the world creating a broad and deep body of open
educational content using a shared model.
– Currently > 200 members
Page 4

5. History (2)
• 2009 Netherlands Wikiwijs program
– National initiative to make OER mainstream
– Initiated by Ministry of Education
• 2011 UNESCO chairs OER
– network which focuses on capacity building on an institutional,
national and international level and research that will
contribute to the growing investigation of the OER
phenomenon, and its potential and impact on education and
learning.
– Fred Mulder, Open Universiteit, Netherlands
– Rory McGreal, Athabasca University, Canada
Page 5

6. Trends and developments (1)
• Transition from OER → Open Education
– OER, Open Teaching and open learning services
– Most recent: Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC)
• Paris Declaration on OER (2012)
– Recommendation to States to support to its fullest capacity
awareness, creation and use of OER
– Accepted on UNESCO World Congress on OER, Paris, 22
June 2012
• Existence of infrastructural components to contribute to an
ecosystem of open education. E.g.:
– Open communities (OpenStudy)
– P2P university
– Saylor.org
Page 6

7. Trends and developments (2)
• European Union started a public consultation
– Opening up Education – a proposal for a European Initiative to
enhance education and skills development through new
technologies
– Important role for OER
Page 7

8. Why OER? (1)
• Do we really have an alternative?
– Sir John Daniels, former President of the Commonwealth of
Learning 2012:
– “First, UNESCO’s 2009 World Conference on Higher Education
identified rapidly increasing demand as the major trend because
nearly one-third of the world’s population (29.3%) is under the age of
15.
– Today there are 165 million people enrolled in tertiary education.
Projections suggest that that participation will peak at 263 million in
2025. Accommodating the additional 98 million students would
require more than four major campus universities (30,000
students) to open every week for the next fifteen years. This
suggests that alternative models of provision will be needed.”
Source: http://www.col.org/resources/speeches/2012presentations/Pages/2012-04-12.aspx
Image: Integration and Application Network, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (ian.umces.edu/imagelibrary/) Page 8

9. Why OER? (2)
• Technical argument
– Education = sharing
– Copy and distributing is free online
• Political argument
– Publicly funded materials should be publicly available
• Quality argument
– Permission to make changes and improvements
• Innovation argument
– Increase quality and decrease cost of content infrastructure
– Accelerates innovation in education
From David Wiley: Why be Open http://slideshare.net/opencontent/
Page 9

10. Challenges
• Localization
• Business models
• Access to internet
– Mobile learning?
• Quality of OER
– Difficult to determine
• Copyright laws
• Language
Page 10

11. Thank You!
Open Courseware Consortium: http://ocwconsortium.org
UNESCO OER: http://bit.ly/rDnfcU
OER Knowledge cloud: http://oerknowledgecloud.com
Policies for OER Uptake (POERUP): http://poerup.referata.com
Robert Schuwer
Mail: robert.schuwer@ou.nl
LinkedIn: http://nl.linkedin.com/in/robertschuwer
Twitter: @fagottissimo
Page 11