This page is part of the Open Practices briefing paper

OERs and open learning

In our 2011 overview of UK OER phase 2 projects and their findings, we noted that providing a quality learning experience was a key motive for releasing OERs. The most obvious way in which OERs influence approaches to learning is through their accessibility.

OERs were seen as particularly valuable to remote students, whether studying part time or at a distance, work-based, field-based, or on placement. Release strand projects  in phase 2 of the UK OER programme focused particularly on these learners and found that, where it was designed for open access situations, open content could create new conditions for engagement.

Learners can access a curriculum which is more flexible, visible, tailored, blended and integrated with real life experience, which allows them to integrate learning and work and which can provide a bridge into university from work-based or informal learning.
(Learning from WOeRK  )

The inherent accessibility of OERs gives learners the option to study in whatever locations they find most conducive, and these same properties make OERs accessible to non-enrolled learners. Institutions were also beginning to see the value in using OERs to provide 'taster' learning experiences, both converting informal learners to potential applicants, and raising general awareness of the university brand. But formally enrolled learners also have high expectations of content accessibility because of their own informal learning practices.

'We are driven by the students, they lead and we follow … to Google and YouTube for example. Digital resources are superceding staff’s lecture structure.' (ADM focus groups)

We know from the JISC learners experiences of e-learning programme and early baseline reports from the JISC Developing Digital Literacies programme that formally enrolled learners are engaging in a 'blend' of formal and informal learning practices. We can speculate that OERs designed to provide a bridge between informal and formal learning – crudely, to get informal learners to engage with formal learning opportunities – can also provide a bridge between different learning practices for students already engaged in study. In both cases OERs provide this bridge by being openly and freely available, but (unlike the vast majority of freely available content) designed by educators to support the learning process.

Beyond their accessibility, OERs were also seen as changing learning and teaching relationships in productive ways. Projects that had involved students in their work generally found that they were comfortable with using open educational resources:

'In their open comments [students] were very enthusiastic and encouraging of the notion of open educational resources... In some respects, students are leading staff, departments and institutions, to the wealth of online resources'   (SCOOTER Project)

However, this project and others found a lack of judgement on the part of students encountering open educational content. The 2011 Learner Use of Online Educational Resources for Learning (LUOER) study concluded that students had generally poor appreciation of provenance and quality when assessing online resources, while the SCOOTER project confirmed that the vast majority students could not distinguish OER (openly licensed, educationally purposed) from other freely available materials. The Pilot Phase C-Change project reported that: [engaging with open content] provides an opportunity for introducing students to critical thinking, appreciation of copyright / IPR / plagiarism and general information literacy. This is clearly so, but teachers should treat OERs as a starting point in developing these skills. It would be wrong to assume that 'digital natives' come ready-equipped to learn effectively from open content:

work needs to be done to not just train staff to search for and use OER but for students also, as users and potentially contributors (SCOOTER Project)

We should also acknowledge that the (albeit limited) experience of UK OER projects in engaging students as collaborators in open learning have not always met with enthusiasm. The Triton Project  brought academics and students together to collaborate on content creation and found that relationships were significantly altered. A focus group organised by the C-SAP Cascade project found that freely available digital resources – whether openly licensed or not – challenged assumptions about what was academically acceptable. These shifts require managing: the CSAP team suggested that where OERs are used there should be a rethinking of assessment methods and of how learning outcomes are negotiated.

Students in these cases were not struggling with the technical skills of editing, uploading and managing content but with the learning skills of trusting and exercising judgement, beyond a strategic focus on what tutors and examiners will value:

as undergraduates, their preference is to focus upon specific and directed research, and on self-directed activities that can ‘clearly’ (and positively) influence the grades attained in assignments (and exams  C-SAP Cascade project

Demand for open, self-directed and participative learning is not emerging strongly from students themselves. Rather, in preparing students for a knowledge-sharing society, we may need to be proactive in expanding their digital literacies and their learning horizons.

Go to the next page in the Open Practices briefing paper: Open practices and open pedagogy