I’ll explore these in more depth in later postings, but for those new to open educational resources, I think it’s helpful to sketch out a few of the important influences that have contributed to the development of the movement. These different influences underlie many of the approaches taken by OER project and can be of help in understanding the differences between projects. They are also at the root of many OER community debates. This is a posting I expect to refer back to with some regularity as a context-setter for other posts.
Open Source Software: There’s no doubt that the single most important influence to date has been the OSS movement, and a starting point for many in thinking about OER is as open source applied to content instead of software. It’s an imperfect metaphor, but one that gets you part way down the road to understanding OER, and is close enough to have been a major inspiration for OER. The two gifts of OSS to OER are the open license concept and a demonstration of the power of collaborative community development models.
Open Content: The term “open content” was coined by David Wiley, and the genesis story is that–lawn mower in hand–he had exactly the thought that the principles of open source software could be applied to content as well. David adapted open source source software licenses to create his Open Content License. The Open Content movement really gained traction when then-Harvard Professor Larry Lessig and others fought back against the ever increasing length of copyright protection by creating open licenses that could allow content creators to forgo some of their copyrights without giving up ownership entirely. Lessig et al’s gift to OER was the observation that most content really didn’t need to be under full copyright and wasn’t intended to generate profit. Further, by forgoing some of the protections guarding financial benefit, these materials could produce tremendous social benefit, either by promoting wider distribution of the work or by permitting the creation of derivatives (not necessarily through community creation, but through chains of individual creators building on and incorporating prior works). In short, the biggest gift of Open Content to OER has been a passionate belief in the power of openness, that less copyright means more social benefit.
Learning Objects: In the 1990’s, as digital learning materials were emerging, it became apparent to many–including the afore-mentioned David Wiley, who has written at length on the subject–that especially in the emerging web environment, learning materials might be made in a modular and reusable fashion, so that they could be reused and reconfigured by many learners and educators for many different purposes. This is often described as the Lego model, where simulations and course units could be unplugged from one another and stacked up in different ways for different uses. Quite a number of educational technologists became energized by this model and developed it in a number of contexts, in both for-profit and open sharing models. The excitement over learning objects had died off somewhat, as technical and contextual challenges have been hard to overcome, but many people involved in the learning object discussions (including myself) have made the transition to the OER field, and many have brought with them a strong interest in technological solutions to educational problems.
I’m sure there are some in the OER community who would debate finer points of the above but this is (I hope) at least close enough to provide a starting point for understanding the field. These three influences express themselves in different ways in different OER projects. Connexions is in many ways a child of the open source software movement, with its community development model; MIT OpenCourseWare is largely an experiment in openly sharing content that was previously held under lock and key; MERLOT is a repository of learning objects. Understanding the influences behind these project helps to understand how they have developed and what they have to offer.
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