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Between November 2nd and 4th, 2010, and thanks to the support of the Division for Lifelong Learning, I attended OpenEd 2010 in Barcelona, the first time the annual conference has taken place outside of North America.

Rather than cover all the sessions I attended I’ll focus instead on eight messages and lessons that I took away from the conference. Here they are (in no particular order):

Design OER for mobile first, desktop PCs second.

Open Educational Resources (OER) provide a strategic opportunity to improve the quality of education as well as facilitate policy dialogue, knowledge sharing and capacity building.Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning or research materials that are in the public domain or released with an intellectual property license that allows for free use, adaptation, and distribution.

I increasingly fear that the open educational resources movement is being used as a way of perpetuating inequalities in education while purporting to be democratic. Some components of OERs also smack of hypocrisy, elitism and cultural imperialism (the bad), as well as failure to apply best practices in teaching and learning (the ugly). Despite my support for the idea of sharing in education (the good), these concerns have been gnawing away at me for some time, so after 42 years of working in open learning, I feel it’s time to provide a critique of the open educational resources ‘movement’.

The learning resource in question is the fifth element of a Moodle unit on Academic Writing and comprises an Exe learning object on ‘How to Avoid Plagiarism’. The learning resource has 21 pages of content that include text, images, and multiple-choice questions.  The main CORRE elements that impact on the conversion of these learning materials will be:

Education is all about learning through innovative solutions, and Open Access (OA) and Open Source (OS) projects drive the goal to bring educational materials to the public through technology. While we have listed some finalized resources in this compilation of the top 50 OA|OS education projects, the focus is on methodologies within OA|OS initiatives.