What Are OER and Why Are They Important to India? OER may be defined as “educational resources (including curriculum maps, course materials, textbooks, streaming videos, multimedia applications, podcasts, and any other materials that have been designed for use in teaching and learning) that are openly available for use by educators and students, without an accompanying need to pay royalties or licence fees” (Kanwar & Uvali´c-Trumbi´c, 2011, p. 5). In this definition, “open” refers not only to content but also to the free use of software tools, licenses and best practices (Wiley, 2008, p. 10). Amongst the various components in the above definition, licenses often prove to be a major stumbling block in the successful practice of OER. This is because “open and free” licensing would necessitate an acceptance of the “4Rs” coined by Wiley (2008, p. 8), which are put forward as a framework to assess the extent to which a resource is open. The 4Rs are described on the OpenContent website (Wiley, n.d.) as a framework for assessing the extent to which content is open: • Reuse – the right to reuse the content in its unaltered/verbatim form (e.g., make a back-up copy of the content) • Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language) • Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup) • Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend) Giving the right for resources to be used in the above four ways demands a paradigm shift in the way teaching–learning resources and practices are perceived by individual teachers and institutions. This necessitates (i) on the part of the teacher, confidence to articulate one’s best practice, willingness to collaborate and commitment to quality and (ii) on the part of the institution, enabling policies of openness as well as viable models to share and yet maintain competitiveness with other institutions in terms of enrolment. Sometimes accessible OER raise questions/doubts regarding the reliability, quality and usability of the “closed” resources currently in use. In India, the extensive reach of ICTs and open source technologies has enabled widespread dissemination of and access to OER. As with ICTs, the imminent danger is to overemphasise the technology and neglect the underlying pedagogy. As Balasubramanian et al. (2009) state: The four most common mistakes in introducing ICTs into teaching are: (i) installing learning technology without reviewing student needs and content availability; (ii) imposing technological systems from the top down without involving faculty and students; (iii) using inappropriate content from other regions of the world without customizing it appropriately; and (iv) producing low quality content that has poor instructional design and is not adapted to the technology in use. (p. 24)
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