Post to IIEP-OER-OPENCONTENT 20081027
From Bjoern Hassler
Posted to IIEP-OER-OPENCONTENT (at) Communities . UNESCO . ORG on 27th Oct 2008 as part of discussion on the meaning of open in 'open educational resource'. (slightly reformatted)
I like to look at 'open' as a means to enabling access. A key question is how you ensure (and in some sense measure) accessibility. Here's a slightly longer email, I hope you'll bear with me.
Let's consider four areas:
- legal openness/access
- physical access (including internet access)
- access in terms of skills
- access in terms of relevance
(1) Open/accessible in terms of legal aspects. CC provides a good model here, and having CC a license goes hand-in-hand with the term 'open educational resource'. What I mean is that imagine a new OER project, that somehow didn't use a CC (or more open) license. It would not be acceptable to the community, and would not get many contributions or funding. I would argue that this is a relatively well understood area, where clear guidance is available.
(2) Open/accessible in terms of physical access. I.e. can a potential user 'physically' get to the resource.
(A) On one end of the spectrum, there is the question of potential users being in physical proximity to a resource, such as near a library. Of course much of the time, we consider OERs as 'web' resources, so the question then becomes whether the user has got access to a computer/internet, or an internet cafe.
Of course as the provider of an educational resource (say from the University of Cambridge), I cannot do much about whether somebody has got access to a computer (at least not in the short term), but I might like to ensure that my source is printable/downloadable so that it can be distributed easily.
So if you were running a truly 'open' project, then it should work across different media, not just 'online'.
(B) However, there is a second aspect to this, which is the case where somebody does have internet, but the connection is not very good. Most of the time, (and oversimplifying) the solutions offered to this are:
- Just forget the connection, it's too bad, let's send CDs instead.
- Let's wait until the connection has improved.
However, interestingly, there is another option: As a resource provider, I can make sure that my resources are low-bandwidth accessible. That is to say: Make sure images are used carefully and are optimised, no big css/javascript, low bitrate versions of audio and video. This gives you much better accessibility, for a large range of users.
In reality, if you look at many OER sites out there, the page sizes are well above what is recommended, sometimes by a factor of 10-30, and often completely unnecessarily. (For recommendations, see e.g. http://www.aptivate.org/webguidelines/Home.html)
So in my view, cross-media/downloading (2A) and low-bandwidth access (2B) should become key requirements for open educational resources.
(3) Access/openness in terms of skills. Users need to have the right skills (or need to be able to acquire them) to be able to access the resources. I think this is an area that is becoming quite well understood, e.g. with the IIEP discussions on the OER toolkit, wikieducator training programs, etc.
(4) Access in terms of relevance. Is the resource created relevant to the users? In my view, this could do with some more discussion, particularly in the international 'North/South' context. Many 'Northern' OERs also aspire to be relevant to the 'South', and I am sure many of them are. However, it would be very interesting to investigate 'Southern' context for OERs more, and to see what the requirements are.
So in summary, for legal access (1), there is good understanding, and an OER can be measured against legal accessibility (1).
For (2), physical/internet access, the advice is very clear, and it is possible to measure in principle, but in practice, many OERs fall short of this.
I guess for (3) and particularly (4), it's harder to measure, and I think much further work is needed.
Anyway, that's the end of the email - hope you're still reading, and looking forward to comments (and disagreement :-)! Bjoern
