Open Teaching Resources

= Open Educational Resources for teachers, not for students

Discussion

Mike Caulfield:

"On the whole, most OER I’ve seen for higher education has been student facing. Even when we look at, say, MIT OCW, what we are seeing is student-facing materials. Course structure is there, but encoded in the form of a syllabus. Content is lecture notes, or the materials students see. Sample tests, etc.

This seems a subtle point, but I think it’s important. When I get professional assistance from the web — on say how to run a presentation, or how to use a new API, it is directed to me explicitly as a fellow professional. It gives me a set of steps to accomplish a task, warns me about the gotchas, holds my hand through the scary bits.

Yes, API instruction will have the bits of code as well, the output and artifacts of production. But professional resources, well done, talk TO me, not past me. They say, hey, I tried this set of steps this way on the version 2.6 installation, and if I had to do it over again, I think I would have copied kses.php first.

OER for P-12 educators does that. It’s professionals talking to professionals. OER in higher ed doesn’t, for the most part, do that. That’s due to a bunch cultural reasons, but if I had to pick just one reason why OER does not have broader adoption in higher ed, I would say it’s because in general OER does not treat the instructor as a fellow professional. It talks past the instructor to the student. If we had no extant educational system, maybe that would work. But we do have an extant educational system, and we’re supposed to be concerned about adoption of OER. And the sale for the use of OER is not the students, but the instructors." (http://mikecaulfield.com/2010/04/09/why-i-am-concentrating-on-open-teaching-resources/)