Mark McGuire's Blog. slides and audio recording from a seminar that he presented at the "Open Educational Resources Seminar" at the University of Otago on 28 June 2012
Though the concept is simple, the economic potential is tremendous and the advantages are two-fold: First, OERs can lower education costs substantially
OERs can also help universities reduce their marketing costs
Open resources can also help bolster a school's global reputation: 91% of visitors
A recent study conducted by scholars associated with Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative demonstrated that students who use OERs can obtain the same or better learning outcomes in half the time compared with students using traditional methods.
Nice review with 2 interesting concepts:
- distinguish between 'content' and 'process in Open Ed
- distinguish between 'push' and 'pull' models
Push models (e.g. MOOCs) provide open access to a structured course experience. Pull models enable academics to choose the OERs they want to use for their context.
Summary:
"In summary, OERs as they are currently being promoted (the current ''push' model), will be a passing fad with respect to mainstream university and college education, because the core assumptions on which initiatives such as edX are based are false. However, OERs in terms of resources freely available over the web will be a game-changer, but in a 'pull' rather than a 'push' model. The one exception to this will be in the area of continuing education for the masses, where there will be continuing demand for structured, prepackaged courses built around the edX model.
In other words, we need a little more humility about the potential role of OERs. There are niche markets such as continuing education that can still be very large that can be served by initiatives such as edX and MOOCs. But the real value of OERs will be to shift instructors away from the creation and delivery of content to focusing on how best learning can be developed and facilitated for, in and by our students. This way we will avoid developing automatons and instead will be developing people who can think for themselves."
Rob there is some good info in here about costs of books and journal fees that might be useful for the arguments about OER saving Murdoch money for the white paper.