The emergence of teaching materials and processes as open educational resources (OER) in higher education in the 21st century is part of the much larger social movement towards ‘opening up’ what was previously ‘closed’ to all except a limited number of people who paid for access to or use of information and services. Initially OER was understood as sharing specific ‘products’, but it now thought of as including the underlying pedagogical ‘practices’. That academics and student tutors want to share their intellectual capital openly with the rest of the world is at the heart of the OER movement. Archer’s (2003) notion of the ‘active agent’, offers some insight into why academics (or students) in HEIs may decide to (or not) use and share OER, and how they might respond in an institutional environment which inhibits or encourages the practice of sharing.

1. Benefits and challenges of OER for higher education institutions Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams Open Educational Resources (OER) Workshop for Heads of Commonwealth Universities 28 April 2010, Cape Town

2. Emergence of OER – part of the Open Movement Open Source Software Open Acces s Open Licences Open Science Open Society Open Movement

3. Emergence of OER in Higher Education Institutions

4. Open Educational Resources The open provision of educational resources , enabled by information and communication technologies, for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for non-commercial purposes. (UNESCO 2002)

5. Open Educational Practices However, open education is not limited to just open educational resources. It also draws upon open technologies that facilitate collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues.

6. OER potential & realised benefits: MIT OpenCourseWare

7. Potential and realised benefits of OER

8. Institutional benefits: Potential and realised at MIT OCW

9. Potential & realised benefits of OER: Issues for HEIs

11. Reported improvements in quality

12. Quality improvement: Issues for HEIs

14. Reported reduction in costs

15. Cost reduction: Issues for HEIs

16. Anticipated and unexpected challenges of OER

17. Anticipated & Additional Challenges

18. Quality assurance: locus of responsibility

20. Quality assurance: locus of responsibility in survey

24. Quality assurance, sustainability and the institutional response

25. Agency of lecturers ... individuals develop and define their ultimate concerns , those internal goods that they care about most (Archer 2007:42)

26. Agency of lecturers ... individuals develop and define their ultimate concerns , those internal goods that they care about most (Archer 2007:42) ... develop course(s) of action to realise that concern by elaborating a project

27. Agency of lecturers ... individuals develop and define their ultimate concerns , those internal goods that they care about most (Archer 2007:42) ... develop course(s) of action to realise that concern by elaborating a project ... translated into a set of established practices

31. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 South Africa License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/za/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Prepared by Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams [email_address] For complete paper see: http://www.col.org/progServ/programmes/livelihoods/Pages/eLearning.aspx#workshops

32. Degrees of openness Hodgkinson-Williams, C. & Gray, E. (2009). Degrees of Openness: The emergence of Open Educational Resources at the University of Cape Town. International Journal of Education and Development using ICT, 5(5): 1-16. Available online: http://ijedict.dec.uwi.edu/viewarticle.php?id=864 [26 October 2009].