Guest Editorial: Open Educational Resources

THE term “open educational resources” (OER) was first proposed at UNESCO’s 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries. Open educational resources are learning content or tools that are offered free of charge under a copyright license granting permissions for users to engage in the “4R” activities: reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. In essence, open educational resources are learning objects that use an open source license. Although there are different licensing schemes (most notably the Creative Commons suite—see http://creative commons.org), they all focus on removing at least one source of friction for “share and reuse” of learning resources: the apprehension of reusing material for which the license is unclear or difficult to adhere to. This is certainly not the only problem related to reuse [3]: findability, technical interoperability of content fragments, pedagogical constraints and affordances, and design for reuse are some of the other barriers. Still, the field of OER has gained considerable momentum and the abundance of content that it helps to unlock for reuse has acted as a platform for innovation in many respects. The papers in this issue present some of the early results of research around that innovation. Historically, much of the scholarly discourse around open educational resources has focused on nontechnological issues like legal aspects around licensing, the moral imperative of sharing educational materials for the benefit of individuals in rural areas and developing nations, and business model problems with sustaining enterprises whose primary activity is giving things away for free. Like the discourse around its conceptual predecessor, the learning object, relatively little attention has been paid to specific pedagogical implications of the open educational resources approach to educational media. Unlike the vibrant technical discourse around learning objects, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to the technical aspects that do or should underpin the open educational resources movement. This is partly because those working in the open educational resources area have inherited a rich body of technical work from learning objects researchers (e.g., the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC) Learning Objects Metadata standards work). However, the open educational resources assumption that content and tools can be freely revised, remixed, and redistributed creates new opportunities and challenges not present in prior learning objects work [1]. Some of the technical challenges that OER enable us to research further include: