Open Educational Resources

Since the mid-1990s the phenomenal increase in the penetration of the Internet has gone hand in hand with growing public awareness of the idea of open access, i.e. making academic documents freely available either as primary or secondary publications. In Germany the idea had certainly reached the scientific community by the time of the Berlin Declaration (2003), and in 2006 the German Research Foundation (DFG) firmly embedded open access in its funding policy. In this light, the fact that only quite a select circle should be familiar with the open educational resources (OER) approach, at least in Germany, is quite surprising since the two approaches share the underlying principle of open content and are therefore closely related.

OER are normally understood to mean digital learning resources, i.e. courses, textbooks, videos, assignments etc., which are available entirely free of charge to all interested learners. They can be used according to the particular interests of teachers and learners, and the contents can freely be combined, altered, extended or adapted. In other words, unlike open access publications, their open content licenses do not really protect them in any way or restrict their use. The history of OER began in the years 2000/2001 when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) published its OpenCourseWare. UNESCO was relatively quick to recognise the significance of this approach and coined the term OER. Since that time UNESCO has actively endeavoured to disseminate OER around the world, and operates its own OER platform (www.oerplatform.org).
The idea of OER has received strong financial backing from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which supports numerous projects worldwide. Finally, the year 2007 saw the publication of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration - which is roughly comparable with the Berlin Declaration on Open Access. In the "2012 Paris OER Declaration", UNESCO calls upon its Member States to participate actively in the OER project.

If UNESCO is taken at its word, OER are about nothing less than the democratisation of education. UNESCO emphasises the following specific points:

• Creating open, flexible learning opportunities worldwide, including for disadvantaged groups. An aspect of particular interest is the use of sophisticated teaching materials in situations where financial resources are very low or non-existent.
• Raising efficiency and quality in the production of new learning materials. The expectation is that the quality of these materials will rise in line with the number of editors and developers working on them.
• Improving cost efficiency. By distributing the material online, for example, printing costs are taken out of the equation. Other costs are reduced by entering into cooperation with universities and institutions and the effects of the anticipated synergies.
• Enhancing innovative potential in the development of teaching and learning materials. The aim is to raise this potential by actively involving the users of the material in its continuing development. OER also heighten the pressure on national stakeholders in education and training to play their part in the provision of innovative forms of teaching and learning.

Ultimately, UNESCO sees OER as an opportunity for fundamental change to education systems, believing that OER themselves already act as part of this transformation process by enabling the general public to participate in learning. Educational institutions are then able to address new target groups. Thanks to Internet-based worldwide diffusion, knowledge is also shared transculturally and specific interests moderated (cf. HYLÉN et al. 2012, p.19 f.).

One of the main challenges associated with OER is stated to be the acknowledgement of cultural diversity. For instance, the bulk of OER material is authored in English and originates from the Anglo-American language area. Also, the OER initiative is essentially Internet-based, which sometimes makes access more difficult in developing countries.

Finally, there is a debate about the quality of OER material. This discussion swings between the extremes of "materials given away for free cannot be of high quality", and "open access exposes OER to a degree of public peer review". In all probability there will be major discrepancies in quality between different OER materials, depending on their source. If the production of the material has been financed by a foundation or by state agencies, they can be expected to have implemented an appropriate level of quality assurance.

With regard to making the use of OER sustainable, questions of financing move to the top of the agenda. At the moment, no definite model for this is emerging. Financing is currently being channelled through institutions, foundations or the state; a few crowd-funding models also exist for securing financial resources.

Vocational education and training in general, and the quality of initial and continuing vocational training in particular, is vitalised by a reliable supply of high quality teaching and learning materials. In Germany at the present time, these are made available by publishing houses; the content is normally developed in collaboration with authors, most of whom participate in the success of sales on a percentage basis. Alternatively, there can be specialist textbooks for specific lines of work. Economic pressures on publishers are mounting in this area as the market shrinks due to falling numbers of school pupils and trainees. In recent years, revenues in the sector fell by around five per cent to approx. 53 million euros in the vocational education segment, and by around three per cent to 317 million euros in the general schools segment. Parallel to this development the sector has not, to date, been able to develop a business model for digital media that has any real impact on revenue.

OER may well put the industry under pressure in the long term, at least if the movement is embraced as enthusiastically in Germany as it has been elsewhere. One point that constitutes its added value from the perspective of the publishers is especially worth discussing: the assurance of quality that comes from motivated, qualified and paid authors, from an editorial review process, and finally, from having the material professionally produced. The argument by advocates of OER that by making the contents openly editable quality assurance for OER is taken care of collectively ("hive intelligence") deserves critical scrutiny at the least. The "Wikipedification" of knowledge does not necessarily lead to higher quality (cf. for example Cap 2012). In November 2012 the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the German Länder (KMK) joined forces with a number of experts, including some from commercial education and training providers, to tackle the theme of OER (cf. DOBUSCH 2012). Again, the quality issue was a part of this conversation. With regard to vocational education and training, the education sector stressed the imperative need to retain Ministry of Culture authorisation of textbooks for vocational school instruction as an aspect of quality assurance. Here it is valid to note that, nowadays, far from all areas are covered by such authorisations; materials for the company-based element of initial vocational training are subject to no authorisation process, in any case. From this perspective, OER materials are merely a supplement to quality-assured and authorised publishing-house products.

The OER debate seems to be gathering momentum in Germany, as was shown by the response to the OER conference held in Berlin in September 2013 under the auspices of UNESCO. It is still unclear how great the potential of OER really is. All the same, initial demands are already being voiced for educational material paid for from public funding to have OER status as a matter of principle. If this development gains a foothold in German vocational education and training in terms of the teaching and learning materials used, it may well mark a definitive departure from the traditional structures of textbook production and sales.

DR. BODO RÖDEL,
Head of the "Publication Management/ Library" Division at BIBB

Translation from the German original (published in BWP 6/2013): Deborah Shannon, Academic Text & Translation, Berlin