How We Understand OER Lane argues that “improvements are unlikely if teachers do not take account of the ways in which students might view and engage with a greater range and variety of OER, not just those offered to them by their own teachers or institutions.” While his article shows the validity of this view, for the moment we focus only on understanding OER from a formal curriculum perspective. The term “OER” refers denotatively to the legal status of an artifact with respect to ownership and rights of use. As a legal concept, it has financial implications for institutional business plans. However, when it comes to OER use or reuse, curriculum issues come to the fore. Curriculum variances are sufficiently great to make the homogeneity that “OER” implies unhelpful. Educational resources can be of different kinds and intended to meet different purposes. For example, the experience recounted by Omollo et al. on medical education in Ghana refers mainly to video productions to support the mainstream curriculum. These afford medical students an opportunity to view what they might otherwise not be able to see as clearly, and students can view the productions in their own time. These materials support the mainstream curriculum. OER of this kind underpin Harishankar’s argument that “chunking” enables ready OER take-up and reuse. The point, however, is that not all OER are of the kind that simply support the mainstream curriculum. In the chapter by Sapire et al. on maths teacher education in South Africa, and in Phillips’s account of the BEd and MEd programmes at the Asian e University, for example, the materials are the mainstream curriculum. Their function is more that of “being the teacher” than of supporting the teaching, and as such it could be misleading to think of them as “chunkable”. This comes back to the fundamental point that the purpose of OER is to provide a better learning experience for students. Learning experiences are formally packaged into curricula. And any discussion on curricula needs to be guided by a clear notion of the nature and function of the OER being considered. Without such clarity, deliberations about design strategy are prone to misunderstanding. If an openly licensed resource is being adapted, it might be helpful to know something about the authorial intention of its creator.
Pedagogy To take the curriculum argument one step further, a vast literature on the pedagogy and strengths of resource-based teaching does not appear to have informed OER development. In many instances, practitioners seem to talk about OER as if it is a different type of educational material, rather than reflecting an understanding of OER as fulfilling the functions of any type of educational material, but with the added benefits of being usable and adaptable without the expense of paying licensing fees or securing permissions explicitly from copyright holders. By not making the connection with this wider literature on the design and use of teaching and learning materials in general, users of OER are often committing themselves to traversing a well-worn pathway of learning about educationally effective uses of resources through practice rather than using the shortcut of learning from the researched and documented experiences of other practitioners.
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