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Da Internetz

Remember when mobile phones had two basic functions: making calls and hammering nails?  For a visual reminder, just do a basic web search for “Zack Morris phone” and you’ll see what I’m talking about.  Ahhh… the Nineties.  The twentieth century was finally coming to a close and homes, offices, and schools everywhere were beginning to get connected via the internet.  Sure, it took a few minutes to load up a content-heavy site, but nerdy teenage boys in computer labs across the country didn’t mind waiting for practically their entire lunch break in order to see the pictures of the USS Enterprise NCC 1701-D on their monitors.  Meanwhile, elsewhere on campus, some instructors were beginning to sense the promise of electronic teaching materials and began the slow process of digitizing their handouts, assignments, and rubrics.

But advances in information technology did much more than facilitate fanboy obsessions and make teachers digitize their transparencies.  The rapid expansion of connectivity that characterized the next two decades acted as a catalyst for monumental change in the way that educators approached distance learning.  Rather than snail-mailing packets for correspondence courses or directing students to watch videotaped lectures on public-access television, the medium of the internet provided immediate access to content.  Entire courses went live online.

Augmented by a generally altruistic desire to promote learning on a grand scale, many educators also began to make their more traditional educational resources (handouts, activities, etc.) available on personal or faculty webpages.  This inevitably led to all manner of content sharing, and with it, various benefits and challenges.  On the one hand, such ease of access to materials made life easier for many instructors and, since many educators like to adjust or improve materials for their own use, overall quality improved.  This free access to and modification, or “remixing,” of educational materials was analogous to the open-source software movement in spirit and in practice, as it not only required some form of collaboration and sharing but, for many educators, became a philosophy.  On the other hand, however, concerns over intellectual property and copyright violations became even more pressing, and many instructors simply shut themselves off from sharing out of frustration and/or terror over the possibility of legal issues.

Promoting Cultural Access, not Restriction

On a larger scale, however, advances in open distance learning and the sharing of resources can be understood as part of a global Free Culture Movement characterized by a desire for mutual quality-of-life improvement.  Advocates of increased openness with creative works claim that the “remixing” that information technology facilitates is a good thing because it enriches our culture by encouraging creativity, innovation, and diversification.

Byte: “Remixing” is central to many different aspects of the free culture movement, including proponents of freedom of information, open-source software, and open educational resources.

This is a global culture of openness and sharing, so there isn’t any singular, authoritative definition of what constitutes OER.  There are, however, some points of general consensus.

• Remixing educational materials tends to improve their quality and relevance.
• Access to learning is a human right, so it should be universal, not only for students that have paid into an institutional system or have access to proprietary software.
• Resources should be explicitly licensed for sharing and modification.

You may or may not share these opinions.  Educators are, by and large, associated with one institution of learning or another, and this talk of learning outside of the institution tends to rub some people the wrong way.  It doesn’t have to be a threat, though.  The production and adoption of open resources can strengthen access to education on a grand scale, and those promoting it are, by and large, educators that know it poses little threat to the standards of accreditation and certification involved in higher education.