I want to welcome Christine Geith and thank her for agreeing to contribute to the Impact of Open Source Software and Open Educational Resources on Education series on Terra Incognita. Her post is scheduled to appear on February 1st, 2008 (eastern U.S.). Christine will be writing about how OER may be shaping the future of a new type of university. Will online learning go away? is there a new opportunity to serve an underserved market? Can current institutions in higher ed figure out how to use these new resources as part of current business practices? The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement around the world is rapidly gaining momentum and taking shape. For example, the Open CourseWare Consortium is scheduled to officially become a non-profit association during the next couple of months and already has over 170 institutions around the world sharing over 5,000 courses. This week, the Cape Town Open Education Declaration officially launched its global call to action. Corporations with content are starting to get involved. Governments are declaring OER as key strategies. And, ideas for new OER universities are emerging.

Christine is an assistant provost and executive director of Michigan State University’s MSUglobal, the university’s entrepreneurial business unit that works with academic partners across the campus and worldwide to develop online institutes, programs and services. She is responsible for developing strategic frameworks and business models and leading all activities that impact revenue growth.

I met Christine over a year ago at a meeting organized at the Commonwealth of Learning, where we discussed the use of MediaWiki and related FLOSS technologies and free cultural works for eLearning to reduce access barriers to education. I am very much looking forward to Christine’s posting, which will point to something that a lot of folks have been talking about, few institutions have commitment to, and no institutions, that I am aware of, have used as first principles when founded. Christine captures this with an intriguing question, “Can the OER movement birth a new university?” Please feel free to comment (early and often!), ask questions, build on the conversation, and enjoy.

Dick Moore of UFI recently pointed me to Donald Clark’s blog posting titled “Plagiarism – blame academia not students,” which I found interesting, not so much because of the major points he made about stale pedagogy and plagiarism, but because of the role that OER plays silently in his arguments. Basically, the posting takes us from an example based on the behavior of a colleague who has banned the use of Google and Wikipedia by her students. Please note that I have not validated Clark’s claims, I am just working from them, but know of other examples that I can validate.

All of the arguments that Clark makes about how the use of searchable and public sources of educational content and the development of collaborative and personal publishing helps support active inquiry, is predicated on the availability of content and licensing that allows open access for reuse and integration into the learning experience. This is captured in one of his concluding paragraphs,

Remember that the web contains hundreds of thousands of texts, textbooks and books, many which are now out of print and not found in individual University libraries. They are quick to access, allow text search and save time and money.

Clark’s posting leads us to ask how important his concerns and arguments would be if there were no open content suitable for education, and how much more meaningful his arguments become as the OER movement continues to develop. Early in Clark’s posting he posits that “education” should take precedence over “banning” the use of Google (for content searching) and Wikipedia (for the delivery) of OER. His argument suggests that the way all content, but particularly open content, is used and presented is a function of knowledge (information literacy), rather than the inherent nature of the content. The learner must be able to determine the quality of materials and how to present materials in a manner that does not result in poor research and plagiarism. In short, the learner must be a critical users, consumer, and re-user of the raw materials of learning. Who is preparing learners to use OER?

This whole thing has got me thinking about how teachers can be prepared to better use OER in their classes and guide their learners to effectively and responsibly use OER. There are excellent examples of educational content designed to service this purpose such as ISKME’s Students and OER. To what extent are these types of materials being integrated into faculty development activities, class orientations, and courses on research methods? Doing this, simply creating awareness of how to use and where to find OER, is a critical part of the open and free (libre) educational resources ecosystem, and at many universities this is a lower barrier contribution than actually producing OER in the context of a formal initiative.