A History of OER

INTRO MUSIC

HOST 
Welcome to our podcast exploring the history of open educational resources. This is the story of the evolution of an idea and a growing movement towards open knowledge, open content, and open licensing. 
Open educational resources are a relatively new phenomenon, but in this podcast, you'll hear from several OER champions who have played a role in the movement
The OER movement began with learning objects. The term  "learning object" was coined in 1994 by Wayne Hodgins, an educator and strategic futurist at Autodesk. 
Randy Labonte CEO of the Canadian e-Learning Network, describes those early days of the learning object.


RANDY LABONTE
Fifteen to twenty years ago, we thought in terms of textbooks, in terms of courses, and learning objects were lesson aids, so they were materials that helped us reinforce a particular concept or approach that was already in the textbook or already designed in a specific curriculum that was handed to us. 
So it was very much a stand-and-deliver time for learning. When we started to shift into the digital era, then those lesson aids became learning objects, they become little lessons but they were digital.


HOST 
Rory McGreal, who began his career as a schoolteacher and is now the UNESCO Chairholder in Open Educational Resources at Athabasca University, was part of this early learning object movement. He realized that a key part of the puzzle would be copyright or licensing.


RORY McGREAL
I grew up in the learning object world at the beginning of the internet and the world wide web where we uh started even in the 1980s creating content and putting it out and letting people use it and in the 1990s there was far more activity and far more interest in online content. And so it developed and it developed as learning objects. And learning objects were basically lessons that encapsulate content. And we used them quite a bit. at the time many people, too many people, were ignorant of copyright law because since  1963 the British Common Law countries like Canada and Britain and even the United States, everything is copyrighted whether you want it to be or not. And uh we started to exchange and share learning objects and uh we found out it was impossible, that legally we were not allowed to share much of the content that we were using, that the licenses were for just one province and if we had interprovincial agreements we couldn't and some of the content was licensed only for the one school board. And we had a major project in the early uh 2000s called EduSource with  different participants in about seven different provinces around the country. And  we worked together and we said Well how are we going to deal with the copyright and after a day and a half of discussion we came to the realization that we could' t deal with copyright, that u if you have  one institution and they make a deal with another institution there might be ten problems to resolve. You resolve them and then you bring in another institution. It's not another ten problems, it's  ten times three problems. And  you bring in another one and it becomes ten times four problems, and exponentially  there are some many problems in dealing with copyright  that you just can't do anything with it. And it was at that point that we realized we had to open up the resources and just  share them. And luckily around the same time, the Creative Commons licensing came about, which allows you to share  your copyright so you still retain copyright but you agree that  anyone can use it however they want. And  that's how I came to the open education resource movement, from that learning object background and that understanding very early on that we could not work in an educational environment with restricted copyright.


HOST 
One of the leading researchers in learning objects at the time was David Wiley, an associate professor at Brigham Young University in Utah and now the Chief Academic Officer of Lumen Learning, and Education Fellow at Creative Commons. 
One of Wiley's key contributions to the early open content movement was the 4Rs Framework, the important rights to: Reuse, Revise, Remix and Redistribute content. 
The 4Rs framework became the core of Creative Commons, a set of licenses which automatically gives you permission to use, adapt, and share content.
Sarah Weston, Director of OER and Technology at Mountain Heights Academy, founded by David Wiley, describes how Wiley's work inspired a new way of thinking about "open content" and how it can be applied to K-12 education.


SARA WESTON
Ok so back in 1998, David came along and he coined the term "open content" and that term was targeted towards the educational community but it was very quickly adopted by the internet users because what this term did, it applied the principles of open source free software movement that was going on at the time to content now. And that term led to the creation of the very first widely adopted license for open content which was called the Open Publication License. But you may not know about that because a couple years later, Larry Lessig and some others came along and founded the Creative Commons and they released a flexible set of licenses that were much  easier for people to use and so they replaced this kind of clunky version of licensing, the Open Publication License that David put together. So he had done some work in open education back at Utah State and because of his work in that post-secondary, people came to him and asked him to see what he could apply to the lower grades,  and why couldn't it apply. If this was going to work, if this was an answer to a solution for, for colleges and universities, then why couldn't we look for that some solution for our secondary schools.


HOST 
As learning objects began to evolve into open educational resources, their use began to increase as well, moving from its primary use in post-secondary education to K-12 education. Weston explains:


SARAH WESTON 
When I first began using OER back in 2009, the biggest barrier was lack of materials.  there was very little out there. Now, interestingly enough, what has happened over the last seven years is it's flipped on its head. Now there's too much


HOST 
This new challenge of an increasing number of resources shows that the concept of the OER is still evolving. 
We began this story with a shift from traditional licensed textbooks to learning objects to open educational resources. We are now seeing a return to a new form of textbook: the open textbook. 
David Porter, CEO of eCampus Ontario, describes the shift that took place while he was Executive Director of BC Campus, which provides services and supports collaborations around teaching, learning, and educational technology across the colleges and universities of British Columbia and the Yukon.


DAVID PORTER 
In the early days, they were producing online courses and resources and  objects that could be used in multiple courses, and so it wasn't really an open textbook program in the early days. It was really an open educational resource program. And then around 2011,  we thought you know we really need to scale this out in a much more meaningful way that begins to bring a focus to what we are doing, not just you know fostering innovation amongst individual faculty members but being really clear that there are multiple value propositions, and a big one for students would be to lower the cost of textbooks and make textbooks more affordable. So we were able to work with government to come together in 2012 with a program that would demonstrate that we could provide open resources for the 40 highest-enrolled first and second year courses in the British Columbia post-secondary system. So we surveyed all the data to identify those courses.
And so that was the genesis of the real open textbook approach in British Columbia, was the shift from open educational resources to something that  had more value proposition obvious within it for students and for faculty, and that was how the open textbook program was conceived.


HOST 
TJ Bliss, a Program Officer in the Education Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, takes a look at our current moment in the evolution of OER and what the future may hold.


TJ BLISS 
I think we are at a moment in history, I think that in a decade from now people will look back and say that this couple of years, 2014, 15, 16 was the pivotal moment for OER in K-12. And that it was really the beginning of much broader movements and it may be seen as sort of, sort of the beginning for K-12. Even though it technically isn't, a lot of things have happened around K-12 that pre-dated this, this is when it started to become  mainstream in public consciousness, this is when  materials suddenly became available that districts could actually adopt. Those are, those are big moments, right? time will tell whether this will also include the moment when districts and teachers actually started to take advantage of OER and realized the potential for OER. I don't know that they'll look back ten years from now and say that this is the moment it happened. It may be that 15 years from now they'll look back 10 years and say that was the moment. We'll see.


HOST 
From the early days of learning objects, through the development of new and open licensing frameworks, and finally towards new forms of resources such as open textbooks we see a history of increasing use and awareness of open educational resources
Special thanks to our guests, Randy Labonte of the Canadian e-Learning Network, Rory McGreal, UNESCO Chairholder in Open Educational Resources at Athabasca University, Sarah Weston of Mountain Heights Academy, David Porter of eCampus Ontario, and TJ Bliss of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
We hope you have enjoyed listening to this podcast and will take some time to explore the other podcasts in this series taking a closer look at Open Educational Resources.
This resource was funded by the Alberta Open Educational Resources (ABOER) initiative, which is made possible through an investment from the Alberta government.
In keeping with principals of Open Education, this podcast is available under an open license, CC-by-SA.
The music "AM-Trans" and "Cash Rules" is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Share-alike 4.0 International license.


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