OER1137c Short Paper (Part of Symposium OER1137) doc

Giving it all away or making it together? An emerging political economy for sustainable OER engagement in Higher Education

John Casey, Hywell Davies, Chris Follows, Nancy Turner & Ed Webb-Ingall, University of the Arts London

Conference Theme: OER strategy and sustainability 

Abstract: After several decades of neo-liberal discourse from policy elites proposing economic competition as the main organising principle for HE we are now being encouraged to produce and give away educational resources on the open market. There are many contradictions in this situation, especially in relation to institutional attitudes to Intellectual Property (IP). Rhetoric about the knowledge economy and the top-sliced funding of commercialisation and knowledge transfer units in HE have tended to encourage a closed and guarded attitude to sharing, in the belief that all IP is commercially valuable. Apart from specialist organisations, the sector has little experience of designing learning resources for others to use at a distance. There is also a growing realisation that teachers can find it hard to understand how to use other teachers resources. In addition, learning resources created by teachers have not been managed at an institutional level to any extent before.
How does involvement with OER fit with the continuing marketisation of HE, as evidenced by the transfer of funding for HE teaching costs from general taxation directly to student fees? The coalition government plainly hold the view that this mechanism will provide the 'invisible hand of the market' to guide the development (or contraction) of non-STEM subjects in HE. In this context can our OERs be more than just a marketing tool?
An important aspect of the UAL's ALTO project is to explore the sustainability of OER activities from a strategic and economic point of view. This paper will turn neo-liberal discourse back on itself in order to consider how institutions might treat OER engagement as a foundation to reinvigorate their core business activity – teaching. It will examine how OER creation can introduce and extend the collaborative learning design skills amongst staff needed to support greater flexible and blended learning opportunities for students. It will also consider how this may extend the range of study modes and options. This is a real challenge for traditional practice based subjects such as Art & Design, it is also likely to get noticed by senior management teams wanting to explore new market opportunities.

Keywords: oer; learning design; blended learning; flexible learning; neo-liberalism; political economy; intellectual property

 References:

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Casey J, Greller W and Brosnan K (2005) ‘Prospects for using learning objects and Learning Design as staff development tools in higher education by 2005’, in Proceedings of Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA, 2005), International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS)

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UNESCO (2010), Taking OER beyond the OER Community: UNESCO Policy Forum, Paris. http://oerworkshop.weebly.com/policy-forum.html