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09/12/2009

Comments

Chris Lott

"Little OER" is at the heart of my contention that we need to stop wasting so much time worrying about content. Content is a solved problem, a non-issue that takes care of itself if we change the manner of teaching and learning to one that defaults to openness.

Big OER isn't a bad thing, but it is going to remain mired down with the burden of sustainability and the lack of easily quantifiable return-on-investment for bean counters and budget hacks...

mweller

@Chris - yeah I'm with you, I'm a little OER guy. But I have come to appreciate the role Big OER plays in the mix - it's not for me, but I think it is important, even if it is only to pave the way for the acceptance of little OER. Part of that changing the manner of teaching and learning might be through the use of big OER.

Dkernohan

What about "middle OER" - individually led and managed but with the explicit support of an institution or other academic body? The original UKOER thesis was to support institutions in changing their processes and policies to "allow" the release of OER...

CogDog

Hmmmm. Might make for a good Grimm fairy tale. Poppa OER says, "This course is too hard for me" Momma OER says "This course is too easy for me" Baby OER says, "No one is looking at meeeeeee"

Seems like a rather artificial distinction to me. Lots of crappy and stellar ones of all sizes.

I have some that are breadbox sized, fridge sized, house sized, penny sized...

The status is a temp thing for now- I forsee in the future perhaps some other factor of reputation. It also says a lot of old mind set to trust brand names.

Martin

@Dkemohan - yes I think that's a good point, and is probably the way to go, a meeting of the top-down, bottom-up approach.

@Alan - I don't feel it is artificial, at this point in time anyway, OERs do tend to fall into these categories in terms of how they are produced anyway. HE institutions are implementing big OER projects to release their traditional material, whereas individual academics are creating new types of content. So there are different approaches to how we produce and release content, but the types of content we get from these approaches are different also (compare MIT Opencourseware/OU openlearn content with say my YouTube or SLideshare content - these are different types of things).
I think as you say, it may be a temporary thing, but the institutional OER may well be the route through which a more varied mix becomes accepted where status is highly regarded.

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