Today’s workshop involved researching some of the different definitions of “openness” in the contexts of open learning and open educational resources (OER’s). Working in small groups, we each read one of three different definitions of given in the course course OER before interviewing each other about what we had found. I was assigned the definition of open education given by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, who use the term to refer to all resources, practices and policies that incorporate OER to provide learners with “high quality educational experiences”. The Foundation also refer to the Creative Commons definition of OER, which emphasizes the importance of free public access to resources and the freedom of users to engage with those resources by means of the “5 R’s” of retaining, remixing, revising, reusing and redistributing the material in any way they choose. The Foundation echoes these points on their website, while also suggesting that OER are necessarily digital materials which are freely accessible on the internet. The Foundation’s goal is to democratize the learning and teaching environment toward personal and economic development, and in 2013 they published a white paper which explains their aims in more detail.
Alternative definitions of “openness” reflected the different contexts of open learning and OER, though common themes appear to be:
- the importance of providing free access to resources
- an emphasis on the individual’s right to freely engage with resources (for example through the “5 R’s”)
- and that free access to and use of OER’s is predicated on the use of digital media distributed via the Internet
