Scott Leslie

Roger, thanks for the reminder of a key constituency for OER - universities in the developing world for whom access to OER content may provide a less expensive means to educate their students. This worthwhile goal can easily get lost amidst some of the other concerns expressed here, valid as those may be.

"The OER movement is strangely similar to the Learning Objects movement" - that made me laugh. Partly because it resonates, but partly because it only resonates when people are trying to force new models to fit old patterns. That to me is when OER start to resembles LO - for instance when you start from a posture of 'closed' and then figure out incrementally how to open select parts of it. Then all sorts of really dumb interoperability issues and questions of 'granularity' etc arise.

I say 'dumb' because as many many many many people are trying to show (I should say, "Have showed already"), if instead of starting from the position of everything being closed and then meting out access, bit by bit, we instead acknowledge the benefits of openness right from the get-go and provide network learning opportunities, many of these issues quickly fade away (as indeed they seem to do on the wider net, where remix and reuse just, well, happen.)

I wish you luck on the research project; feedback from intended reusers of OERs has got to be a positive thing, I would think. But I guess my comments above would be to urge you NOT to simply accept the terms of the problem as set out by the existing 'OER Publishers' but to challenge them to rethink these from the perspectives of what really would make this work, BOTH for your institutions and for themselves, as well as challenge them to think outside of the frame of straight 'publishing.' I know there are lots of folks who would be receptive to these ideas, and indeed it's my take at least that the way to "do OER" is not at ALL a 'done deal' but one that's still emerging.

Sylvia, I do actually think it's unfair for the OER movement to carry too much of the load for "content-centric education" as that is not at all exclusive to it; bad pedagogy is bad pedagogy, period, and we find it everywhere.

I think the examples you point to (I hadn't seen the UNESCO Open Training one, though - thanks!) are good examples of efforts to break away from a solely content-focused view of OER. And their are others too. I believe there is a growing awareness of the issue but it does seem like a valid concern, one that should hopefully inform all of our practice.

I meant to include a reference to one of the many putting forth this argument - http://learnonline.wordpress.com/2008/11/13/do-we-need-open-educational-resources-oer/ - lest it be seen as simply a 'straw man.'

This has not totally restored my faith that given access, people *will* remix content, but thought I must point out http://cterfile.ed.uiuc.edu/mahara/view/view.php?id=327, an example of a large number of 'student' remixes (I put that in quotes because it appears as though the students were all themselves instructors as well) that surfaced on Jared Stein's highly recommended blog.

This issue is related to the other I just posted about OER's being 'content-centric' but is perhaps more subtle.

Many existing OER projects are re-publishing instructor materials that were developed for explicitly instructor-led and -paced classes, yet one of the primary uses cases for OER is by independant learners in self-directed study.

To what extent do you see this as a problem? Are there ways in which instructor-led materials can be repurposed to work better for self-directed learners, or is itself simply carrying on a 'banking' model of education?