OpenEd - What Does It Mean To Be Truly Open? The Next Generation of OER
peter.suber's bookmarks 2014-04-05
Summary:
"The premise of Open Educational Resources has always been that making content available to educators and students freely and universally would help accelerate educational progress and democratize educational opportunity.
To that end, a host of OER catalogs were started over the last decade. These include Curriki, OERCommons, and Connexions. All of these catalogs relied on a community of content creators building compelling resources and making them available for free through some open source license such as Creative Commons.
These catalogs are generally still rather small (all generally around 50,000 resources or less). Despite the growth of the flipped classroom their traffic is steady or shrinking. I believe that this is because, while the first generation OER catalogs benefitted from content creators opensourcing their own content, the first generation OER players haven’t practiced what they preached to the content owners that they benefit from.
Specifically we believe that its important for an effective OER catalog to practice what it preaches to constituent content creators: BE OPEN. What does that mean for a catalog? We think its several things: open source the catalog itself, provide an open API for searching and contributing resources, universal access to all partners, and openness to paid and free content. Let’s break these down one by one...."