Theme: The contribution of educational technologies in advancing a discourse competence of general school pupils Contents

Commonly used educational resources

While books are commonly used as educational resources, lectures play a pivotal role in teaching. Digital technologies are changing how books are published and shared. It is also changing the nature of lectures. Newer technologies are allowing educators to use animation and simulation in class. The following subsections provide brief reviews of these areas. Teaching has always involved communication in some forms. Higher education was no different. Classes often comprise of lectures. Lecture series on special topics published as books created a passive learning channel parallel to the classes. Such passive communication persisted with the introduction of broadcasting technologies. Ease of recording videos and editing them are pushing the boundaries of recorded lecturers. Educators are capturing their lectures during or prior to a class. Not only educators, instructional videos are being created by people who are coming from different professions. Free video hosting sites, such as YouTube and Vimeo, are helping to making these videos public. These sites allow students to view the lectures at their convenience. Students can control the pace of these lectures and watch them repeatedly. However, videos are another form of media that have own challenges. The real-time and dynamic interactions in the classrooms cannot be replicated through these videos. It often becomes difficult for educators to assess students understanding when such methods are used. Many times, such as in the Flipped classroom method, these lectures are used as supplementary material, and educators spend their time in the class on solving problems or real-world scenarios related to a topic (Brecht and Ogilby, 2008). Quality of the content also poses concern since anyone with the right tool and not necessarily the right knowledge can create and host the videos on various topics. Educators have to practice caution on utilizing third-party educational video materials. Digital resources hosted in the Web are transient in nature – they can be deleted or edited at any time, without preserving and sharing the provenance of the resource. This alone makes it difficult for educators to heavily rely on digital resources that are developed by others. Demonstration is an integral part of higher educations in many disciplines. Digital technologies are shaping the way educators demonstrate any topic. Presentation software, such as PowerPoint, Keynote, or Prezi, is changing the way educators weave a story. However, studies show that the effectiveness of such technologies depends highly on pedagogical style (Brock and Joglekar, 2011; Virtanen et al., 2012). Additionally, advancements in visualization technologies have allowed building visual aids to effectively demonstrate new concepts. Instructors are using presentation, simulation, and animation in making their lectures expressive and demonstrative to reach students who better connects with visual elements (Jonassen, 2006; Tufte, 2006). The impact of such technologies on teaching is many-fold. On the positive side, these materials are re-usable, shareable, can be animated, and allow the teacher to spend more time interacting with students. On the other hand, it takes time to prepare such material, and educators need technical support in preparing and using them. Such materials may increase the pace of the class making it difficult for less prepared students to cope with the class. Research confirms that when compared to traditional lectures, the usage of such software provides students with positive class experience, though the grades are not likely to be changed significantly (Jennifer et al., 2006; Harris, 2011).

Digital technologies are starting to supplement or replace traditional paper-based book. Many printed books now have electronic versions, which are known as e-books (electronic books). Portability of e-books is one of their biggest advantages. Compared to paper-based books, e-books cost less, can contain interactive animation and simulation to describe concepts, can have integrated assessments, and are often customizable. E-books are being published by publishers as well as groups and individuals. Hence, quality of e-books needs to be assessed properly to help educators make informed decisions on proper e-book for a class. In classrooms, educators spend significant time explaining new concepts. The dynamic properties of many e-books (e.g., animation and simulation) help educators convey the same information without spending significant time and effort on presenting the topics during class. However, we should keep in consideration that while some students are good at responding to visual cues, others respond better to auditory instructions. Interactive digital books only add another layer to the activity to support learning. Interactive material is not necessarily quality material. The overall quality of the textbook has to reach certain standard in order to be effective and useful. Some of these e-books allow educators to view student activities in the book (e.g., exercise completion and example viewing) (Shaffer et al., 2011; Edgcomb et al., 2014). Knowing if students spent enough time on a topic allows educators to better evaluate student performance as well as gauge the level of student engagement. Many of the e-books lack a robust assessment system. Activities or exercises require exact answer to be considered as a correct response. An extra space or comma can make the response mark as incorrect (Pulman and Sukkarieh, 2005). This can cause student frustrations. Students also show a preference on permanence and resale values, making e-books, at times, less desirable than print copies.

Definition and scope

The idea of open educational resources (OER) has numerous working definitions. The term was first coined at UNESCO's 2002 Forum on Open Courseware and designates "teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. Open licensing is built within the existing framework of intellectual property rights as defined by relevant international conventions and respects the authorship of the work".

Often cited is the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation term which used to define OER as:

OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.

The Hewlett Foundation updated its definition to:

"Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions". The new definition explicitly states that OER can include both digital and non-digital resources. Also, it lists several types of use that OER permit, inspired by 5R activities of OER.

5R activities/permissions were proposed by David Wiley, which include:

Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)

Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)

Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)

Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)

Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

Users of OER are allowed to engage in any of these 5R activities, permitted by the use of an open license.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defines OER as: "digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students, and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning, and research. OER includes learning content, software tools to develop, use, and distribute content, and implementation resources such as open licences". (This is the definition cited by Wikipedia's sister project, Wikiversity.) By way of comparison, the Commonwealth of Learning "has adopted the widest definition of Open Educational Resources (OER) as 'materials offered freely and openly to use and adapt for teaching, learning, development and research'". The WikiEducator project suggests that OER refers "to educational resources (lesson plans, quizzes, syllabi, instructional modules, simulations, etc.) that are freely available for use, reuse, adaptation, and sharing'.

The above definitions expose some of the tensions that exist with OER:

Nature of the resource: Several of the definitions above limit the definition of OER to digital resources, while others consider that any educational resource can be included in the definition.

Source of the resource: While some of the definitions require a resource to be produced with an explicit educational aim in mind, others broaden this to include any resource which may potentially be used for learning.

Level of openness: Most definitions require that a resource be placed in the public domain or under a fully open license. Others require only that free use to be granted for educational purposes, possibly excluding commercial uses.

These definitions also have common elements, namely they all:

cover use and reuse, repurposing, and modification of the resources;

include free use for educational purposes by teachers and learners

encompass all types of digital media.

Given the diversity of users, creators and sponsors of open educational resources, it is not surprising to find a variety of use cases and requirements. For this reason, it may be as helpful to consider the differences between descriptions of open educational resources as it is to consider the descriptions themselves. One of several tensions in reaching a consensus description of OER (as found in the above definitions) is whether there should be explicit emphasis placed on specific technologies. For example, a video can be openly licensed and freely used without being a streaming video. A book can be openly licensed and freely used without being an electronic document. This technologically driven tension is deeply bound up with the discourse of open-source licensing. For more, see Licensing and Types of OER later in this article.

There is also a tension between entities which find value in quantifying usage of OER and those which see such metrics as themselves being irrelevant to free and open resources. Those requiring metrics associated with OER are often those with economic investment in the technologies needed to access or provide electronic OER, those with economic interests potentially threatened by OER, or those requiring justification for the costs of implementing and maintaining the infrastructure or access to the freely available OER. While a semantic distinction can be made delineating the technologies used to access and host learning content from the content itself, these technologies are generally accepted as part of the collective of open educational resources.

Since OER are intended to be available for a variety of educational purposes, most organizations using OER neither award degrees nor provide academic or administrative support to students seeking college credits towards a diploma from a degree granting accredited institution. In open education, there is an emerging effort by some accredited institutions to offer free certifications, or achievement badges, to document and acknowledge the accomplishments of participants.

In order for educational resources to be OER, they must have an open license. Many educational resources made available on the Internet are geared to allowing online access to digitised educational content, but the materials themselves are restrictively licensed. Thus, they are not OER. Often, this is not intentional. Most educators are not familiar with copyright law in their own jurisdictions, never mind internationally. International law and national laws of nearly all nations, and certainly of those who have signed onto the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), restrict all content under strict copyright (unless the copyright owner specifically releases it under an open license). The Creative Commons license is the most widely used licensing framework internationally used for OER.

History

The term learning object was coined in 1994 by Wayne Hodgins and quickly gained currency among educators and instructional designers, popularizing the idea that digital materials can be designed to allow easy reuse in a wide range of teaching and learning situations.

The OER movement originated from developments in open and distance learning (ODL) and in the wider context of a culture of open knowledge, open source, free sharing and peer collaboration, which emerged in the late 20th century. OER and Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS), for instance, have many aspects in common, a connection first established in 1998 by David Wiley who coined the term open content and introduced the concept by analogy with open source. Richard Baraniuk made the same connection independently in 1999 with the founding of Connexions (now called OpenStax CNX).

The MIT OpenCourseWare project is credited for having sparked a global Open Educational Resources Movement after announcing in 2001 that it was going to put MIT's entire course catalog online and launching this project in 2002. Other contemporaneous OER projects include Connexions, which was launched by Richard Baraniuk in 1999 and showcased with MIT OpenCourseWare at the launch of the Creative Commons open licenses in 2002. In a first manifestation of this movement, MIT entered a partnership with Utah State University, where assistant professor of instructional technology David Wiley set up a distributed peer support network for the OCW's content through voluntary, self-organizing communities of interest.

The term "open educational resources" was first adopted at UNESCO's 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries.

In 2005 OECD's Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) launched a 20-month study to analyse and map the scale and scope of initiatives regarding "open educational resources" in terms of their purpose, content, and funding. The report "Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources",published in May 2007, is the main output of the project, which involved a number of expert meetings in 2006.

In September 2007, the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation convened a meeting in Cape Town to which thirty leading proponents of open education were invited to collaborate on the text of a manifesto. The Cape Town Open Education Declaration was released on 22 January 2008, urging governments and publishers to make publicly funded educational materials available at no charge via the internet.

The global movement for OER culminated at the 1st World OER Congress convened in Paris on 20–22 June 2012 by UNESCO, COL and other partners. The resulting Paris OER Declaration (2012) reaffirmed the shared commitment of international organizations, governments, and institutions to promoting the open licensing and free sharing of publicly funded content, the development of national policies and strategies on OER, capacity-building, and open research. In 2018, the 2nd World OER Congress in Ljubljana, Slovenia, was co-organized by UNESCO and the Government of Slovenia. The 500 experts and national delegates from 111 countries adopted the Ljubljana OER Action Plan. It recommends 41 actions to mainstream open-licensed resources to achieve the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal 4 on “quality and lifelong education".

An historical antecedent to consider is the pedagogy of artist Joseph Beuys and the founding of the Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research in 1973. After co-creating with his students, in 1967, the German Student Party, Beuys was dismissed from his teaching post in 1972 at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. The institution did not approve of the fact that he permitted 50 students who had been rejected from admission to study with him. The Free University became increasingly involved in political and radical actions calling for a revitalization and restructuring of educational systems.

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