[Oer-community] Introduction to the discussion

Paul Lefrere p.lefrere at open.ac.uk
Tue Oct 5 03:37:58 MDT 2010


Note: Although I'm using my university email address, my comments below are
personal and do not necessarily represent university policy. For the record, my
personal email address is lefrere at mac.com

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Dear Susan, all

It's great to see this discussion starting. Thank you for circulating the
briefing document (10 10 OER Community-OCWC.doc), which mention three
sub-themes:

1. Building OpenCourseWare
2. Using OpenCourseWare
3. Sustaining OpenCourseWare

Sub-theme 3 states the importance of strategies for long-term sustainability of
OCW/OER projects. It says "...think of sustainability not in terms of money,
but rather in terms of impact." Fine. Then I begin to worry, because it says
"...investments will come IN THE PLACE OF other current expenditures." (my
emphasis). "In the place of" sounds like diverting funding from one area to
another area. To me, that seems like a zero-sum game. In my view we don't need
to make the assumption that our options are limited to what we can do within
overall institutional budgets, and we don't have to decide on what to allocate
to OCW/OER at the expense of other activities. Diverting funding is potentially
very divisive: imagine for example that the "current expenditures" at risk of
being diverted to OCW/OER are for social justice programs that have lower
impact than OCW/OER on impact measure A, but higher impact than OCW/OER on
impact measure B, and that we pay attention only to measure A and use that to
justify shifting funds. Sounds fine? Not for me. I'd want to know how to
protect people affected by the cuts. They might include people who are surely
important to any caring institution, such as the disabled, minority groups, and
historically-disadvantaged groups such as women.

There is a better way, in my view: create wealth in socially-desirable ways (=
benefits to society as a whole, rather than the few), using OCW/OER where
appropriate, and direct a proportion of the new wealth to augment the total
budget available for social justice interventions including OCW/OER.

This is not fanciful. It requires liaison with people in other communities,
likely to be well-disposed to OCW/OER. An example is the Open Science
community, see eg an open-access book from the National Academies Press,
"Managing University Intellectual Property in the Public Interest" [acronym:
MUIPPI], [ http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=1300
]http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13001

The MUIPPI book is representative of a body of well-informed work on how
society as a whole, as well as individual public institutions, can benefit from
a systemic (and systematic) approach to sharing and using innovations. I shall
be contributing to that process in various multi-partner international
projects, one of which has just begun. Our commitment to our funders (public
bodies) includes interoperability with other programs, eg OCW/OER, and sharing
our findings, insights, contacts etc in open ways that have the potential to
create societal wealth at a significant level without harming weak groups in
society, and, as part of that, can help individual learners and their
communities to get lasting benefits, valued by them, from the knowledge created
and shared in joint work such as OCW/OER. 

My conclusion: I would be delighted to collaborate with anyone who wants to
explore projects that implicitly assume a subtext to sub-theme 3 in the
following direction:

Think of sustainability not in terms of money, but rather in terms of impact
that is wholly positive (eg, new forms of wealth creation, compatible with the
public-interest). Take action in an integrated way: link OER and OCW to forms
of Open Innovation and Open Knowledge Sharing that benefit society as a whole
(eg, socially-focused exploitation of publicly-funded intellectual property, to
create new sources of wealth for the world) and that can lead to
socially-desirable outcomes (eg, creating new types of job, and making students
more employable by helping them to apply what they learn via OER and OCW, to
bridge the "knowledge-action gap").

Best wishes

Paul



-- 
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