OER1137d Short Paper (Part of Symposium OER1137) doc

Web2.0 is the future of OER

Alex Fenlon, HEA Engineering Subject Centre, Loughborough University

Conference Theme: OER strategy and sustainability 

Abstract: This paper will attempt to address a potential conflict between Institutional Repositories, Virtual Learning Environments, third party sites such as OpenLearn, and web2.0 solutions to hosting issues. Most institutions would like resources their academics produce hosted on their sites, driving traffic and hits to their analytics accounts.  The problem is that such sites are often not designed for surfacing teaching and learning materials outside of the campus environment, while others are reliant on project funding with no guarantee of their availability in 12 months. Employing social media sites is the only way to ensure OERs are truly open and still available when funding is removed.
By utilizing large web2.0 hosting services academics can ensure their resources are available to a community of users as well as being fully surfaceable by the search engines. These sites often allow the embedding of content hosted on them into other websites, which would overcome the hits generation, proprietary issue mentioned above. Many allow users to create channels for their resources, with users branding their webspace to suit their requirements with little effort.
Web2.0 sites are already on the radar of the majority of potential OER users, the learners at least. Traffic and hits have already been generated without the need to spend time and money developing new project sites. They represent ready-made dissemination vehicles spreading resources across the globe in an instant. All that is required is a quick Twitter post with a URL and away you go. But Web2.0 is not perfect by any means. It is outside of the control of the average user without Service Level Agreements (SLA) meaning if anything needs changing or amending it is impossible or very difficult to achieve. Many web2.0 sites are being purchased by venture capitalists raising the question mark over their future. However, with sites like Facebook spurning films about their creation this uncertainty seems a long way off. Developing a strategy that combines and optimizes the use of Web2.0 site will be the only way for the OER movement to sustain its current growth in a climate where funding is being reduced at alarming rates.

Keywords: ukoer; engsc; engscoer; ipr4ee; ll2012; web2.0; slideshare; sustainability; technical issues; funding; future