It can be argued that OER is a subset of a wider concept, open learning. If used correctly, OER can make a significant contribution to advancing the principles of open learning (although many people in the OER community make the mistake of assuming that OER and open learning or ‘open education’ are similar concepts). Open learning is an approach to all education that enables as many people as possible to take advantage of affordable and meaningful educational opportunities throughout their lives through: sharing expertise, knowledge, and resources; reducing barriers and increasing access; and acknowledging diversity of context.

To better understand OER’s relationship with ‘openness’, watch this video.

Why Open Education Matters (2.49 min)

 

Key open learning principles include:

  • Learners are provided with opportunities and capacity for lifelong learning.
  • Learning processes centre on the learners and the contexts of learning, build on their experience and encourage active engagement leading to independent and critical thinking.
  • Learning provision is flexible, allowing learners to increasingly determine where, when, what and how they learn, as well as the pace at which they will learn.
  • Prior learning and experience is recognized wherever possible; arrangements for credit transfer and articulation between qualifications facilitate further learning.
  • Providers create the conditions for a fair chance of learner success through learner support, contextually appropriate resources and sound pedagogical practices.

These principles should be applied to develop meaningful educational opportunities, regardless of the 'mode of delivery' used. Sometimes learners do not enjoy proximity to conventional learning centres, or if they do have access to classes and courses near to the place whether they live, they may be working, or have family responsibilities which render them unable to attend fixed face-to-face classes at a centralised venue. Or, they may simply prefer to study in their own environment, at their own pace. To provide access for these learners, education programmes should be designed using open learning principles. The transformative educational potential of OER revolves around three linked possibilities:

  1. Increased availability of high quality, relevant learning materials can contribute to more productive students and educators. Because OER removes restrictions around copying resources, it can reduce the cost of accessing educational materials. In many systems, royalty payments for text books and other educational materials constitute a significant proportion of the overall cost, while processes of procuring permission to use copyrighted material can also be very time-consuming and expensive.
  2. The principle of allowing adaptation of materials provides one mechanism amongst many for constructing roles for students as active participants in educational processes, who learn best by doing and creating, not by passively reading and absorbing. Content licences that encourage activity and creation by students through re-use and adaptation of that content can make a significant contribution to creating more effective learning environments.
  3. OER has potential to build capacity by providing institutions and educators access, at low or no cost, to the means of production to develop their competence in producing educational materials and carrying out the necessary instructional design to integrate such materials into high quality programmes of learning.

Deliberate openness thus acknowledges that:

  • Investment in designing effective educational environments is critically important to good education.
  • A key to productive systems is to build on common intellectual capital, rather than duplicating similar efforts.
  • All things being equal, collaboration will improve quality.
  • As education is a contextualized practice, it is important to make it easy to adapt materials imported from different settings where this is required, and this should be encouraged rather than restricted.

  1. How ‘open’ is your institution? It’s interesting to note that even some ‘open’ universities are not so. Consider these questions:
  • Are the courses at your institution free or at least subsidised?
  • Do students have to come to campus to learn?
  • Can students learn anytime or are there restrictions as to when courses are available?
  • Can students construct their own programmes from modules across faculties?
  • Can student take as long as they like to complete their studies?
  • Are the units transferable to other institutions?
  • Is your course content released with an open licence?