OER

A federate reference structure in an open informational ecosystem

Heinen, Richard (UDE); Kerres, Michael (UDE); Scharnberg, Gianna (UDE), Blees, Ingo (DIPF), Rittberger, Marc (DIPF)

It can be considered as one of the advantages that the production and distribution of learning materials is much easier in the digital world. The OER movement benefits from these possibilities. Whereas, publishing is one thing; the other is to maintain the material, to make it accessible and to implement methods for quality assurance – not only as the responsibility of one publisher but as a task for a whole educational system.

Repositories of OER (ROER) can help to fulfil these tasks, if they follow some given criteria (Atenas & Havemann, 2014).Yet unsolved and underestimated is the question how to enhance transparency between different ROERs (Conole & Alevizou, 2010). Or: ROERs are regarded as appropriate tools to foster (McGreal et. al., 2013) the awareness for OER (UNESCO, 2012). However ,this reflects only the perspective of publishers and not of an (inter)national educational system. If resources are open the different metadata created by authors, editors and users, or even aggregated automatically should be open as well and accessible from different places. Furthermore: collecting descriptions, peer-reviews, ratings and other metadata independent from the resource adds to quality assurance and transparency and to informational autonomy of the user.

So far we have described the main idea of an open ecosystem and the benefit of joining metadata created by different users. As a next step we suggest a federate system of OER reference systems to connect resources and metadata across ROERs.

The paper will describe a federate ecosystem for OER using the example of the German educational system ,where a variety of ROERs (Muuß-Merholz & Schaumburg, 2014) and reference platforms (Kühnlenz et. al., 2012) have been established over the past years. In order to develop this ecosystem not only metadata standards are necessary, but also open APIs to exchange information In conclusion, it is essential that all relevant stakeholders agree on one transparent policy that they develop collaboratively.

References

Atenas, J., & Havemann, L. (2014). Questions of quality in repositories of open educational resources: a literature review. Research in Learning Technology, 22(0).

Conole, G., & Alevizou, P. (2010). A literature review of the use of Web 2.0 tools in Higher Education. A report commissioned by the Higher Education. Milton Keynes, OK: Open University.

Kühnlenz, A., Martini, R., Ophoven, B., Bambey, D., & others. (2012). Der Deutsche Bildungsserver–Internet-Ressourcen für Bildungspraxis, Bildungsverwaltung und Bildungsforschung. Erziehungswissenschaft, 23(44), 23–31.

McGreal, R., Kinuthia, W. & Marshall, S, eds. (2013) Open Educational Resources? Innovation, Research and Practice, UNESCO, Commonwealth of Learning and Athabasca University, Atahbasca.

Muuß-Merholz, J., & Schaumburg, F. (2014). Open Educational Resources (OER) für Schulen in Deutschland 2014: Whitepaper zu Grundlagen, Akteuren und Entwicklungen. Internet & Gesellschaft Collaboratory.

UNESCO (2012): Paris OER Declaration. Retrieved February 10, 2014, from: http://www.unesco.de/oer-faq.html

Open and Closed Informational Infrastructures for Education: The Case of “Edutags” as a Connector for Open Learning
Kerres, Michael ; Heinen, Richard
Learning Lab of University Duisburg-Essen, Germany

Teaching and learning in school essentially relies on analogous and digital media, artefacts and tools of all kinds. They are supported and provided by various players. The role of these players for providing learning infrastructures and the interaction between them are discussed in the following paper. Increasingly, Open Educational Resources (OER) become available and the question arises how the interaction between these players is impacted. On the one hand, some players implement closed informational ecosystems that might provide a rich and coherent environment for learning, but also lock the users into a defined and often restricted environment. On the other hand, other players are interested in developing an infrastructure that supports open learning without the boundaries of closed informational ecosystems. Such open informational ecosystems must provide interconnections to numerous, in principal, unlimited number of platforms for learning contents. In the context of the project “Edutags” a reference platform is being implemented by way in which the contents of various providers are being connected and enriched through user-generated tags, commentaries and evaluations. The discussion points out that such an independent reference platform, operated separately from content platforms, must be considered as an important element in an open and truly distributed infrastructure for learning resources. Hence, we do not only need open educational resources to support open learning, we also need to establish an open informational ecosystem that supports such approaches.