[Oer-community] Introduction to the discussion - helping to close the cost/non-cost divide

[Terri Bays]

Paul Bacsich's comment below  is the kind of thinking the conference organizers had in mind when we wrote about "investments will come IN THE PLACE OF other current expenditures," in this case, money that is currently spent on teacher training could help support research into how OER work as a means towards teacher training.  In other words, we should be looking at the ways in which OER serve needs for which the community (broadly or narrowly construed) is already willing to spend assets (including time and effort as well as money).  The idea is not to take money away from other projects but to lay claim to money being spent to do things that OER can do as well or better than other projects.

In other words, we were trying to elicit BOTH the conversation to which Paul Lefrere is inviting us, and a conversation about internal value to particular communities.

Terri


On Oct 5, 2010, at 3:33 PM, Paul Bacsich wrote:

> I hope in this discussion we can take a broad view of OER as not only material directly involved in the learning of students, but also (for example) in the learning of people in institutions to get better at teaching students. That blurring of the distinction may help to reduce the distance between "them" and "us". We are all students some of the time, and not just in informal learning, especially now with so many professional development programmes at masters and doctoral level.