OER-- An International Trend with Slow Development in Sweden

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-08-20

Summary:

Please use the link above to access a pdf of the article published in the open access journal ‘sciecominfo - Nordic-Baltic Forum for Scientific Communication.’ The mission of the journal is “to [1] To inspire new activities and facilitate knowledge exchange between Nordic/Baltic stakeholder, and to increase the international visibility of Nordic and Baltic policies and initiatives [2] To stress the importance of Open Access in the Nordic and Baltic countries and to describe both theoretical and best-practice models for financing, rights management and other fundamental issues. [3] To disseminate to both a Nordic/Baltic and an international readership information about successful initiatives and other activities in the Nordic and Baltic countries.” The journal “is an Open Access web journal covering current developments in scientific communication in the Nordic/Baltic countries and all aspects of scientific and scholarly communication...” The current article opens as follows: “Open Educational Resources, OER, are net-based resources, free to use and in many cases also free to remix and tweak. The global OER movement is very important. Development in Sweden however has been rather slow both with regard to open access publishing and sharing learning resources. Within Swedish higher education there have been several notable initiatives by individual enthusiasts or pressure groups. University libraries are well aware of OER as a phenomenon and as a development based on principles closely related to Open Access and Open Source. Internationally the OER movement is growing within all sectors of education, from K-12 to higher education. Some of the factors behind this development are the fact that education programs are increasingly globalised and that informal learning is valued and evaluated together with formal learning. Also in higher education general skills are growing in importance; in particular so-called 21 st century skills such as information literacy, communication skills, digital literacy etc. Important OER projects have been undertaken by large international organisations such as UNESCO and OECD. In July 2011 the organisation Commonwealth of Learning (COL) & Unesco published the Open Access publication ”A Basic Guide to Open Educational Resources (OER)”*Unesco is in the process of revising their guidelines and arranged in the autumn of 2011 an online workshop to discuss the proposal of new guidelines, ”Guidelines for OER in Higher Education”. The nations who so far have been more successful in integrating OER in education (the US, Australia, The Netherlands and the UK) have governmental authorities and other bodies that finance projects,elaborate clear guidelines och promote OER in the country’s academic community as a national priority... Unfortunately a conservative attitude towards ICT resides still in further education and the gap between an increasingly digital economy and a basically analogue educational sector is widening. The labour market of the future will require quality and innovation, independance and entrepreneurship, and the challenge for higher education is to create an environment that stimulates such characteristics... A further problem for Sweden is the concept that teachers own the right to their material rather than the university (known as the teacher exception or in Swedish lärarundantag), and clarity in this issue demands attention from university leaders and authorities... Individual universities can develop strategies for OER but it is necessary to have national coordination to minimise unnecessary duplication and the creation of parallel processes. Just as with Open Access it is necessary to have directives and strategic initiatives in order to change attitudes. In Sweden OER is still a grassroots movement, and without the full commitment of university managements and government authorities the use of OER will be fragmented and ad hoc. A workgroup in the network ITHU (IT in Higher Education) has carried out projects to spread knowledge about OER in higher education. In order to move further on it is now necessary that main bodies such as the National Library of Sweden, the KK-foundation, HSV, SULF and SUHF now take initiatives and provide funding. The initiatives should not be limited to the knowledge about OER, it is crucial to also discuss questions such as the right to use learning resources versus the ‘teacher exception’ and find a solution together with the teacher unions. A national Swedish OER network, including above mentioned organisations and the universities, could pursue these issues on a wide front.”

Link:

http://nile.lub.lu.se/ojs/index.php/sciecominfo/article/view/5421/4747

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.policies oa.licensing oa.government oa.universities oa.advocacy oa.libraries oa.oer oa.funding oa.education oa.sweden oa.unesco oa.oecd oa.col oa.hei oa.libre

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

08/20/2012, 18:48

Date published:

03/23/2012, 18:48