TELWill

I want to explore three potential issues with OER from the reading I have done on it, these issues are not necessarily critical barriers to the success of OER, but could be contributory factors to the lack of a revolution that its initial proponents foresaw. Firstly and possibly most importantly it seems that there is still no clear definition or understanding of what OER actually is comprised of. In terms of individual words the concept is easy enough - 'Open Educational Resources', the content being created needs to be accessible, device agnostic, reusable and transferable. However, when one digs deeper to define what this content would look like it becomes more complex - "No one seems to know what a learning object is in the first place. One of the absurd definitions I heard was, 'as small as a drop, as wide as the ocean.' In other words, if everything is a learning object, then nothing is a learning object" (Merrill, as cited in Welsch, 2002). This make

This infographic is designed to give an overview of some of the different forms that Open Education can take, this has been adapted from a piece written by Tony Bates in 2015, the original piece can be read here . Representing open education

Open education is a philosophy built around the idea of making educational resources freely and openly available to all. This requires everyone to be able to access, share, create and challenge high quality educational resources. Technology has been a critical enabler in doing this - especially in terms of making knowledge shareable and accessible. If knowledge is a key part of this initiative then the Internet is by a a large margin the single largest resource of information that has every existed on earth, a large proportion of the information held within the Internet is open and accessible, therefore in many ways the Internet is the largest source for open education that has ever existed. However, in many definitions open education is seen as knowledge or resources that reside in an explicitly educational context - for example the OU question that has prompted this post asks us to describe ' your experience with open education. Is it just with the OU, or have you studied a MOOC