The concept behind ‘open educational resources’ (OERs) has been around for several years. The principle of OERs is simply that teachers and lecturers make their learning materials freely available for others to use. At first, this might sound like a radical, even controversial, idea. Why, after all, should practitioners share materials that they spent hours preparing? Don’t the resources belong to that individual’s employer? And who would want to use other people’s materials anyhow? Yet the concept of sharing materials has gained some ground over the last decade. The Making open educational practices a reality large quantity of resources on services like YouTube, Edu and iTunes U demonstrates that many are increasingly willing to share their work and reuse the work of others. The term ‘OER’ was defined in 2002 at a UNESCO-hosted forum as: 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.The majority of the work on OERs has so far been undertaken within the higher education sector. The focus has been predominantly on the development of OER repositories. These repositories consist of learning materials that are freely available and are often based on well-tested and effective learning materials. Many organisations use these repositories as showcases of their educational offerings. Organisations like UNESCO and the Hewlett Foundation have supported the movement and have provided considerable help both in terms of networking and funding. There is now a plethora of OER repositories, and many organisations have signed up to be part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium (
http://www.ocwconsortium.org/). The thinking behind the creation of OER repositories was that if these were created and promoted, then learners would use them and teachers would repurpose them. However, this has not been borne out in practice. OERs are being viewed and used by some teachers and learners but they are not being used extensively. Evidence of individuals re-purposing materials is even more scant, particularly among further education and informal adult learning practitioners. Evaluation of the use of such repositories The concept of open educational resources has gained ground in the last decade but they are still not being used extensively. GRAINNE CONOLE and ETA DE CICCO ask how we can ensure a better uptake and enhance the quality of shared resources indicates that uptake is relatively poor. Why is this? Well, actually taking someone else’s resource, understanding it, taking it apart and then rebuilding it for a different context is a complex process. Add to this the potential technical and organisational barriers, and perhaps the lack of uptake is not so surprising. Research conducted as part of the Olnet initiative (
http://olnet.org) investigated why this was the case and looked in particular
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