Doing OER and OA: More Questions than Answers

Ed.: I’m pleased to welcome our next guest blogger, Dr. Ken Udas. Dr. Udas is executive director of the Penn State World Campus, the distance education campus of Pennsylvania State University. In addition to distance and online education administration, his professional interests include educational access, open educational resources, and internationalization of education. He is the editor of the Open Source Software and Open Educational Resources in Education series on Terra Incognita, the Penn State World Campus blog.

Opinions are solely those of the author.

I am not a professional that works with or thinks specifically about “Open Access” on a daily basis. I do distance education, and I do not even actively teach right now. I am a general manager, so I spend much of my time writing reports, doing budgets, planning, helping folks run their projects, advocating for my campus, etc. Not so glamorous a vocation, but an important role in keeping things moving. That said, I do think quite a bit about the broader set of activities around open educational resources (OER), and through writing this post I am thinking in a more disciplined way about OA.

Two of the things that I am passionate about are a) making accessible and high-quality educational services available principally to non-traditional learners and b) the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) toward that end. So, if you are a “full-time student” and spend more time at a destination campus or university library than at work, in prison, driving a cab, sitting in airports, gathering water, etc., you are probably not the student that I spend most of my time thinking about. But you probably will be someday — or your partners are, or your kids will be, because they and you will then fall into the category of “non-traditional learner,” along with the vast majority of learners in the world (who are, in fact, only “non-traditional” from the perspective of the higher education elite).

Regarding the connection between accessible education, open educational resources, and open access journal articles, it does seem that OA falls within the larger discussion about OER, which includes all sorts of stuff like open source software, graphical content, syllabi, etc. Much of the most dynamic discussion among the OER community is all of the stuff that Stevan Harnad clearly identified as “What OA Is Not” in his posting, The University’s Mandate to Mandate Open Access (which, incidentally, I enjoyed very much).

Before launching into a short story I would like to float out there for your thoughts and feedback three questions that I will return to later. They are:

1. Are there enough people using OA resources to improve educational access?
2. Are there parallels between OA and other forms of OER?
3. Is asking “What does it mean to do Open Access?” a meaningful or important question?

As mentioned, I am sort of a general manager for the Penn State World Campus, which is the distance education campus of Penn State University (PSU). One of the efforts that I am involved with is called PSU Online. The point of PSU Online is to help online learning become an effective part of the educational experience of Penn State students, so more can enjoy the benefits of “one university distributed,” which is one way that we describe ourselves.

A few weeks ago I was in a PSU Online committee meetings when the topic of Open Courseware was raised, and a wonderful discussion broke out about what we are doing to promote the development and distribution of open courseware. It started with a discussion about intellectual property policy and it led to all sorts of great questions about open courseware’s value to the university, the communities we serve, the impact on teaching faculty, etc. and finally ended with some talk about what we should be doing to provide (create, distribute, …) more open courseware.

At this point I piped up and mentioned that we should also be talking about how to ensure that we are using more open courseware, as well as producing it. Why is it that our faculty and learning designers tend to create new content rather than using, modifying, and reusing content that has already been made available and licensed for open use? Obviously there is some of this going on, but why so little, particularly given the cost associated with developing online courses? Two points were raised:

1. Many faculty members would feel as if it were “cheating” to use somebody else’s content. That is, they were expected to write their own, so it would not seem “right” to use materials already in use.
2. Open Courseware, and OER more generally, are not trusted. Many faculty members are happy to use bits and pieces of courses from trusted colleagues, but not from an OER project.

I am not sure if I fully buy either of these explanations, but I am willing to take them at face value for the time being. So, now I am back at the three questions I raised above.

These questions are not rhetorical. They are really directed at the community that this blog targets, current students and future scholars.

Are enough people using OA resources?

Apparently, there is a lot of OA material available, and I assume that there are a lot of OA articles being read and referenced. But is OA being used to directly and positively impact educational access and outcomes? Why or why not?

Is asking “What does it mean to DO OA?” a meaningful or important question?

I ask this because of a fantastic posting that Amee Godwin of OER Commons recently made, titled On “Doing OER”. In this post Amee talks about Open Educational Resources less as things and more as processes. This is a powerful and engaging direction, because it connects creation, use, and re-creation in a cycle, poking at some of the underlying principles of an ecosystem that supports the economics of “openness.”

So, is this an important question relative to OA? Has it already been asked and answered and I missed the conversation?

Are there parallels between OA and other forms of OER?

Of course, the answer is Yes, but are the parallels relevant to the questions posed above? What can practitioners of OA learn from practitioners of OER, and vice versa?

You know, it really is a risk to ask questions in a public forum. Not so much because they might be provocative, but because they might not be interesting, or at least interesting to the people who read them. I hope that some of this resonates with some of you and that we can exchange some ideas and ask each other some questions.