Common Questions

OER is not a panacea to your resource issues.

They are not always that easy to find, can be of variable quality and at have been known to be removed overnight.

A brief history of OER

"Open Education (OE) and OER have their origins in the open source, open knowledge and free sharing movements in the latter part of the twentieth century, although the relationship of those movements to education has been a symbiotic one. Alongside these there were developments in open and distance learning that drew on rapid innovations in technology. In 1994 the term ‘learning object’ was introduced by Wayne Hodgins to describe any packaged digital resource that had defined educational aims and could be shared. This idea has been criticised because it fixes resources to a specific context with no sense of reuse and adaptation. Nevertheless the notion of shared learning resources brought about attempts to define standards for cataloguing and searching for teaching materials online – one of the precursor organisations to the HEA, the Learning and Teaching Support Network, was closely involved in these standards in the UK. A further development grew from the work of one of the leading developers of the early intellectual framework for OER as adaptable and repurposable, David Wiley at Utah State University; he promoted the idea of ‘open content’ (analogously to open sources software) and licencing, which in turn led to the foundation of the Creative Commons in 2001. " Taken from https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/oer_toolkit_0.pdf