10 reasons why OER fails. CAVE dwellers (Colleagues Against Virtually Everything)

The promise was of a future where Open Educational Resources would sweep the globe and those pesky publishers would be washed away by a tsunami of high quality, free stuff. It happened to a degree with Wikipedia, Khan, YouTube, MOOCs and Duolingo but almost in spite of the institutional OER movement. In fact, there seems to have been a bifurcation in OER between the flood of publically funded projects, that tended to atrophy even die, and a successful crop of global successes. So why has OER been so successful outside, rather than inside, of education and academia?
I’d argue that this was due to several things; scepticism, institutional attitudes and a lack of awareness around marketing and sustainability in the educational community. The successes have been those that weren't held back by these barriers.

1. War on Wikipedia

Wikipedia is still being treated as a pariah resource in education. I still encounter fierce resistance and an almost visceral dislike of Wikipedia by professional educators, in contrast to almost universal acclaim by learners and users. Rather than accept the fact that it is the most used and valuable knowledge base we have ever known, and that almost every learner on the planet finds it useful, educational professionals engage in a low level war against its use, usually on the back of uninformed, anecdotal statements on accuracy. This has been counterproductive but symptomatic of the problems around OER. If it doe not originate within an institution, it cannot be useful.

2. War on MOOCs

Rather than celebrate the existence MOOCs, many educatiorss immediately engaged in a guerrilla war, against either the quality of the content or the ‘privatisation’ of education. This is a shame as it was knee-jerk envy, rather than analysis. The argument about drop-out is a clear category error. Completion is not the point. The argument about quality, uninformed. If the truth be told, MOOCs have had a profound effect on attitudes towards online learning. The relentless attacks have stymied their accreditation but the good news is people keep on making them and that learners keep on taking them, especially in vocational subjects.

3. War on Khan

You’d think it was Ghengis, not Salman, Khan, who gave us this fantastic set of resources in maths and other subjects. Breaking the back of the ‘talking head’ lecture, he stuck to simple narration and short pieces of exposition, putting most maths teachers and lecturers to shame. The backlash was predictable but the learner numbers, which are astonishingly high, just keep on growing. Why would we NOT want an organisation that delivers sustainable "education for anyone, anywhere", in a huge number of languages, for free?

4. Educational cynicism

Rather than promote the use of OER, teachers and academics often (not all of course) take a distant, sniping, hostile, even histrionic stance against their use. I’ve encountered far too many CAVE dwellers (colleagues against virtually everything), yet the use of OER would widen (not narrow) the experience and pedagogic sophistication of most teachers. It is OER that allows more blended learning and flipped learning. In practice, it is rather sad that the success of OER has been in learners, in their hundreds of millions, by-passing teachers and using these resources without their knowledge, sometimes defying their prohibition.

5. Free at point of access

More focus on saving costs would not be ‘managerialism’ but an honest attempt to lower the cost of education, which we know is spiralling out of control. Education (not information) wants to be free. That’s a good mantra, as it undermines the existing, incredibly expensive model based on scarcity. Sure there’s been a rise in open policies, open journals and huge amounts of debate around OER but more focus on making education accessible through lower costs is what’s needed and that is what Wikipedia, Khan, MOOCs, Duolingo and others have provided.

6. Anti-corporate

Generally, despite the massive support by money from the private sector, such as the Hewlett and Gates Foundation, among many others, there is an anti-corporate tendency against anything that gets support from these sources. This is a shame, as I’d argue that the most successful tributaries of the OER movement have been fuelled by their active funding and participation, far more than most of the government funded, especially EU activity. This is not a private v public argument, it’s an argument about opening up the future of education.

7. Obsession with reusability

OER, in its early days, got bogged down in an obsession with reusable learning objects (this led to the largely hopeless SCORM standards) and a far too ‘teacher-oriented’ view of reusability. In some circles the obsession with the reuse of content by teachers, rather than straight use by learners, has led to an inward-looking attitude, even poorer quality resources. Teaching is a means to an end and the most valuable OER resources are those used directly by learners. The sad fact is that reuse by educators forms a tiny, tiny part of overall use. In Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness, Nathaniel Tkacz rightly shows that so-called ‘open’ resources often contain hierarchical structures. This is certainly true with the reusability argument, where old ideas about quality and reusability are really epistemological arguments about control and certainty.

8. Poor marketing

OER initiatives too often lack the marketing skills to get their resources recognised and used. Poor, often confusing branding, no real marketing budget, expertise or marketing plan, results in repositories of unknown and unloved resources. This is especially true within institutions (not all) where lacklustre leadership, toothless policies and inertia, thwart sensible sustainable growth.

9. Social media scepticism

Another symptom of this marketing malaise, in educational circles around OER, is the failure to see social media, through links to openly licenced resources, as a primary means of dissemination. Scepticism around social media is quite simply a failure to understand how dissemination (read marketing) actually works. One could argue further that social media is an OER resource in itself.

10. Unsustainable

The failure to see ‘sustainability’ in terms of business model and funding has also been the real Achille’s Heel. Far too many projects were doomed to succeed, in the sense of being funded but not on any financially sound model beyond pilots and repositories, and therefore remained insular. The successful examples, such as Wikipedia, Khan, YouTube, DuoLingo and MOOCs transcended the traditional ‘keep it in the University’ model, to provide hundreds of millions with valuable resources. They use a variety of models but sustainable models they remain.

Conclusion

Empirically, we’ve seen in Wikipedia, YouTube, Khan, Duolingo and MOOCs, truly wonderful examples of how pragmatic and sustainable openness can be achieved. Yet these are the open resources that get the most mud slung at them. Rather than sniping, educationalists should embrace the decentralisation, democritisation and disintermediation of learning through such resources. The examples I’ve quoted, that work, have grown because they started and exist outside of educational institutions. This is a shame, as we could have reshaped higher education to become much more open and accessible without this scepticism. It would seem that the future of OER needs to be in sustainable models beyond these institutions.

PS

I highly recommend The Battle for Open by Martin Weller, published under a Creative Commons licence. Its focus is largely on HE but it contains a great deal of useful and well argued positions – although not the positions I take in this blog – and he does, rather smugly but mistakenly, quote me as being some sort of silicon valley narrative apologist.