The “freedom to use in certain ways” offered by open licensing is central to the concept of OER, in that teachers and institutions are able to adopt and adapt others’ works so as to save time and effort in teaching preparation and delivery and to enhance the learning experiences for the targeted learners. Currently, much OER development, both generally and in the surveyed countries, is still rooted in the “publish for use as is” mode, where the sharing is one-way rather than reciprocal. Lane’s unpublished review also found many perceived barriers to both sharing and adapting resources. These are caused by the misconceptions noted earlier and also by fears about opening one’s personal material and practices to the scrutiny of others, in case they are deemed of low quality, especially as teaching is considered to be largely a solo act performed in front of a limited audience. This may equally be the case with publishing the reworked material of another teacher as with publishing one’s own material. Thus, the review suggested that there may be more direct benefits if teachers work collaboratively to share their combined knowledge and experiences, and thereby to co-author common OER that all are then free to adopt and adapt without having to worry about the legal or quality implications of doing so, as has been reported in other studies (Lane, 2011; Van Dorp & Lane, 2011).
Regulatory Barriers and Pedagogy Much of the formal education system at primary, secondary and tertiary levels in the surveyed countries is heavily prescribed or governed by national policies and statutory laws, particularly curriculum and qualification frameworks. Such prescription can make institutions and teachers cautious about changing their own policies and practices, including sharing their educational resources and adopting and adapting other people’s resources. This tension between the academic values of sharing knowledge and the “commercial” values of selling educational content or services and/or competing for fee-paying students both nationally and internationally has been raised in the UK (OLTF, 2011) and in Europe (ELIG, 2011), as well as in many international online discussion forums. In the CIS, pedagogy still favours face-to-face presentation by an individual lecturer rather than flexible, resource-based, student-oriented learning managed by a team of teachers working together. A lack of support staff to help teachers adopt these new practices is also a serious problem in promoting OER. Significant attention has not yet been given to how learners might gain value from using OER outside of school or college and throughout their lives, and equally how OER might provide a means to both widen participation in higher education and create bridges between secondary schools and universities or universities and workplaces. However, collaborative development of resources and adoption of new pedagogic approaches are long-term issues with respect to OER use, as even collaborative problem-based and student-oriented didactic approaches have yet to be embedded in many higher education teaching practices, outside of some distance teaching institutions. This particularly relates to how well the co-developed content meets the contextual needs of the different partner institutions. To ensure that the open educational content meets the quality standards required by the institutional
34