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Open Education Resource (OER) projects can be clearly defined as collections of online education resources that can be found via a single site. As much as the idea of mining the vast amount of OERs to curate a list of them is laudable, it is also somewhat laughable in the face of the rapid pace at which OERs are uploaded, expanded upon, moved to another site host, or bought up and tossed out by the profit-driven gig economy that has become characteristic of the IT industry. OER projects live and die as quickly as the clothing on fast fashion racks is changed. Freisen (2009) contends that Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT’s) 2001 endeavour to put all its coursework online has been the vanguard of OER project success, but such success can be interpreted in several ways. In advance of evaluating such success, however, it is paramount that MIT’s Open Courseware Initiative be clearly defined as an OER and not merely an internet-based adjunct to the school.

An OER is “the open provision of educational resources, enabled by information and communication technologies, for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for noncommercial purposes” (UNESCO, 2002, p. 24, as cited in  Freisen, 2009). To be clear, the provider in this definition is not named, and so it can be said that MIT might very well fit into this description. However, at the other end, there may be some discrepancy as to the noncommercial purpose of MIT’s OER.

MIT does not attract a wide variety of internet traffic and it may be argued that the school’s Open Courseware Initative has become primarily a promotional tool to attract potential students to attend the classic, lecture-driven courses that are represented online. A secondary use of MIT’s OER project may be that it acts as a review-and-revise resource for students who are physically attending classes. Freisen says little if nothing at all about measuring the success of MIT’s courseware initiative in the light of who accesses the school’s open courses and only purports its longevity as the almost-singular marker of its success. A generalization is made that more users of the MIT Open Courseware (OCW)  are from outside the U.S.A., but that cannot be verified as many users now log onto the internet using Virtual Proxy Networks (VPNs) automatically through their own security software to maintain privacy and security. This is where the academic researcher runs into an ethical dilemma. Friesen could not have been able to track who precisely accessed MIT’s courses, where they were from, or for what purpose they used the content. The research was ostensibly forced to turn inward, staying within the white ivory walls of academia to argue and define OERs as other academics saw them. Freisen drew attention to sustainability and placed a heavy focus on one program (i.e. MIT OCW). The inability to broaden and deepen the research may have also been a question of ethics. Research in academic fields require a high degree of ethical guidance and practice and because of this they do not lend themselves well to broad and detailed data collection. This is especially problematic due mainly to issues of privacy and accessibility as the field of internet-based data mining and analysis grows .  Longevity again becomes the focus for Freisen in illustrating a timeline of OER projects that have become inactive.

Rightly so, Freisen makes the argument that OER projects cannot exist as learning objects, but need the constant process of curation and service updating to remain active, “Online educational resource initiatives of this kind, one can conclude, need to be seen as processes or services rather than as products that persist of their own accord.” (2009). However, when Freisen quotes MIT’s own 2005 report on its OCW project, it carries a hint of self-aggrandizement or at least promotion of a singular learning institution. What Freisen does make clear is that academic bodies like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) make statements and pass motions to improve the quality of life for all, but have very little active and measurable influence on the way that stakeholders, creators, and users collectively make the changes that those very academic bodies wish to see. This perhaps illustrates an aspect of the white ivory tower syndrome from which academia suffers. As the mass of literature about education grows, there is a tendency for the meta-literature on the subject to put more distance between the hypotheses they present and their utility in real-world applications.

Higher education’s leaning toward increasing the weight that prior academic literature should be carried in the production of theses is somewhat self-serving and has the potential to ignore the ultimate purpose of such institutions to promote a better society. Instead, the effect is one that seems to encourage theoretical and philosophical discourse and argument between scholars and researchers to the extent, in some cases, that nothing notable is added to the field of scholarly research that is being studied, nor is a tangible call to action made. OERs do hold the potential to change lives, but the effect that literature about them might spur someone to credit such research with that effect is basically inconsequential. Without action, all ventures in learning and teaching, including OERs, wither and die. The question remains, “Do OERs improve the chance for successful learning and transcend themselves from the institutions (virtual or not) that offer them to the betterment of society on the whole?”

 

Reference

Friesen, N. (2009). Open Educational Resources: New Possibilities for Change and Sustainability. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 10(5). https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v10i5.664