Abstract
Open education ecosystem is dynamic in its nature and has an ever-growing body of educational resources with Open Educational Resources (OERs). OERs offer great opportunities for the learners freely access to digital content which accommodate their learning needs and can help to fill the inequality gap in education worldwide. This chapter starts with the brief history of OERs, the philosophy of open education, the openness movement which entails the concept of OERs; it continues with current and future role of OERs for the learners and teachers who experience learning and teaching in online learning environments. The motives for facilitating OERs and design criteria for ensuring quality are discussed. Moreover, current debate on the sustainability, discoverability and credibility issues for OERs and the future of online learning are handled considering recent studies on the factors related to development and adoption of OERs by the teachers and academics. Main objective of this chapter is to interpret the potential and challenges of OERs in shaping the future of online learning.
TopBackground
After Covid-19 pandemic, it is believed that the world once again realized the fact that access to learning and knowledge worldwide is a vital issue as it is also mentioned by the UNESCO (2019). UNESCO’s General Conference in 2019 accepted The Recommendation on OER (Open Educational Resource) which is considered to be first international normative instrument to accepts OERs. And that indicates the worldwide recognition of open digital resources. Late back in 2012, The UNESCO Paris Declaration (2012) clearly stated that “everyone has the right to education,” and the participant countries accept the OER movement as it supports that human right naturally. That notion is considered to be at the heart of Open Education and OERs and can be the vantage point of 2019 OER Recommendation of UNESCO.
In the history of OERs, Elder (2019) noted that open-source community inspired open education movement regarding free and accessible open content. Philosophically, open education advocates that education is strengthened when shared openly (CCCOER, 2022). Also, Bliss and Smith (2017) implied that the main purpose is to “equalize access to disadvantaged and advantaged peoples of the world – in MIT’s language, to create ‘a shared intellectual Common”. Moreover, Jhangiani & Biswas-Diener (2017) explained that the work ‘open’ means customizable by and shareable between instructors and the open education movement offer a great potential for increasing the quality of education for every student. Roncevic (2022) implies that when one says ‘open’ he/she does not refer to without any restriction or financial support. It just refers to ‘free access’ to learning materials, platforms.
It is considered that the early history and rise of OERs have their roots back in 1970s. As Roncevic (2022) reports that the Internet Archive - a non-profit library of millions of free contents – and the Project Gutenberg- the first online repository of public domain content are early examples of OERs historically. Some of the key milestones of the early history of OERs were summarized as follows (e-Learning Infographics, 2014; Wiley, 2010):
Key Terms in this Chapter
Creative Commons: An organization that provides free legal tools for granting permission for others to use one’s work in certain ways.
Online Learning: A learning experience which happens via the Internet and learners are instructors engage in learning-teaching activities independent from time and/or place boundaries.
Openness: A networked approach that advocates providing free, digital educational materials under an open license.
Open Data: A term used for publicly available data that is openly-licensed, interoperable, and reusable.
Open Education: A term that based on openness, technology and free share of knowledge in education.
Open Courseware: A type of open educational resources that provides interested users free course content, evaluation tools and plans.
Open Educational Resources (OERs): Free and accessible learning-teaching, and research resources which generally have a type of open license.