Appendix 8: Open Educational Resources Our focus in this appendix has been on reviewing a snapshot of current issues relating to educators’ motivations and experiences around sharing and teaching in an OER context. The core notion of openness and collective benefit that are key principles associated with Web 2.0 practices align with the principles inherent in open source initiatives. In an educational context, the most prominent is the Open Educational Resource movement, which has gained scale and depth since the early 2000s. Atkins et al. (2008) articulate a shared vision that educational materials should be made freely available, so that they can be shared and reused by others. A perception that such sharing is economically viable, and will lead towards sharing of good pedagogical practices in education has also been articulated (Iiyoshi and Kumar, 2008). Several well‐known – yet distinct – initiatives within the OER world continue to purport a mission of education as a ‘public good’. In addition current thinking as well as emerging policy agendas on education are shifting from the idea of simply providing access to content, towards the notion of creating ‘open participatory learning ecosystems’ (cf. Smith and Casserly, 2006; Seely‐Brown 2007; Seely‐Brown and Adler 2008). We begin this section with a brief overview of OER and definitions surrounding sharing open content and educational practices. We begin with an overview of emerging research in the field and more specifically we focus upon evidence of open practices developed in relation to the use of OER have an impact on teaching and learning. We draw on some of the emerging literature coming from our research as part of the Olnet initiative43. In particular, we focus on how these relate to the deployment of OER and to motivations and experiences of educators for accessing, sharing and reflecting in teaching. As part of a developing research portfolio we have been conducting interviews with innovators in open access and the world of OER. The framework for literature reviewed and for empirical insights outlined in the later sections has been been devised by Panagiota Alevizou and has been reviewed extensively in a number of conferences (see Alevizou, 2009; Alevizou, 2009a; Alevizou, 2010; Alevizou, Wilson and McAndrew, 2010; Alevizou and Forte, 2010). From learning objects to open educational resources The term ‘learning object’, defined as ‘a digital resource which has an element of intentional learning’ became popular in the 1990s (Littlejohn, 2003; Wiley et al., 2002). Since the establishment of the MERLOT database44, one of the earliest available on the web, a number of other repositories gained prominence during the 1990s, at both institutional and 43 www.olnet.org. Olnet, funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, builds on the basis of work on OER initiatives at Carnegie Mellon University (the Open Learning Initiative), together with OpenLearn at the Open University. 44 http://www.merlot.org
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