Author: Elvis Bakaitis (Page 4 of 5)

One of the latest questions surrounding O.E.R. is how best to sustain the growing movement towards free, openly-licensed materials. The current model has been mostly grant-funded, and powered by a widespread interest in lowering the costs of education.

One article for InsideHigherEd, “Open Resources in an Age of Contingency,”  observes a relationship between O.E.R. and part-time (or “contingent“) faculty members. Others have speculated that a key towards true integration of O.E.R. (and other open practices) into higher education will center around issues of faculty workload, tenure and promotion. 

The Role of Educational Technology

OER typically rely upon online platforms, so that they can be made accessible for students. Here at CityTech, most O.E.R. course sites are hosted on the OpenLab, which  is created “by a team that includes City Tech faculty, staff, and current and former students” as an “an open-source digital platform.” This allows for the true involvement of CityTech community members, who will shape the ways the OpenLab develops.

There are many other platforms (including for-profit business) that offer their services to colleges and universities, such as Lumen Learning, TopHat, and others. Part of the question about maintaining the spirit of “open” involves questions of how and why resources are made “free” – and at what potential risk to student privacy and other data.

Across higher education, “open” has gained traction as a buzzword, attached to many disparate and conceptual topics – Open Access, Open Educational Resources, Open Research, and more. Some have questioned the core ethos of the movement, and how the push towards openness can create new tensions around issues of sharing, privacy, research methods and more.

“Restless water” by Tomasz Baranowski is licensed under CC BY 2.0

David Gaertner, a member of the First Nations Studies Department at the University of British Columbia, writes compellingly of the historical lineage of Western research methods into Indigenous communities, and the relationship to language used in promoting Open Access (OA) scholarship.  For Gaertner and others, “OA has very real consequences for Indigenous peoples, insofar as it contributes to neo-Enlightenment ideologies of entitlement to knowledge.” As someone positioned within the field as “a non-Indigenous scholar who works with Indigenous communities,” Gaertner describes himself as familiar with the importance of recognizing community boundaries, and the flexibility/responsiveness required to do so.

Using the hashtags – #openforwho  #openforwhat – Gaertner asks us to question our own presumptions of access, and whether closure, in some cases, may actually serve as a “a path to openness.” For example, the concept of preserving the intention/spirit/context of an item by not allowing its public viewing, but intentionally restricting access to associated communities or groups.

In a response piece on her own blog, O.E.R. educator Christina Hendricks writes of the tensions between privacy and closure – and how the latter is arguably “more about respecting the appropriate boundaries of spaces, conversations, and knowledges given the context of what those are.” Considering these questions is critical to the developing path of OA, O.E.R., and other developments under the wider umbrella of public scholarship.

Much of the buzz around Open Educational Resources (O.E.R.) has been driven by the very legitimate goal of lowering educational costs – particularly, the increasing price of textbooks from traditional publishers. Financial considerations are a defining aspect of the student educational experience, and O.E.R. has helped to mediate these issues by offering a free, zero-cost option.

“nothing” by Katy is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

On the flip side, however, there are ways in which O.E.R. presents new challenges, especially for students with limited access to technology. Although the principles of O.E.R. theoretically extend to all forms of media (a printed course packet is equally “open” if it is openly-licensed and free of charge), O.E.R. are typically presented via online platforms or course sites. This does guarantee that any student has immediate, 24/7 access to the material from all devices (mobile phone, laptop, desktop computer, tablet).

At the same time, many students are primarily dependent on their mobile phones for internet access, and thereby restricted to viewing course materials on a tiny screen. In their 2014 study, “Commuter Students Using Technology,” co-authors Smale and Regalado found that for some CUNY undergraduates, the availability of campus computers/technology was “a critical factor in their daily college experience.” Many spoke of sharing computers with other family members, and relying upon their mobile phones for a way to compose written class assignments (as opposed to a more traditional word processing program on a laptop or desktop computer).

These considerations are something to keep in mind while building O.E.R. course sites: is the site responsive to viewing from mobile devices? Are there ways to improve site readability, with tweaks to its structure, attribution practices, and descriptive hyperlinks? At the same time, we might also open ourselves to larger questions of how and why educational materials are provided to students, and in what contexts the word “access” is used.