Candace Thille from Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, spoke about a

research network that CM and the Open University UK are starting in

order to find better ways to analyse effectiveness of open educational

resources. Besides the much needed focus on rigorous analysis of the

benefits of open education on the individual learner (something that

only very few institutions other than CM have done) she made two

comments about the objectives for the OER movement that stuck in my

mind:

She argued that part of the reason we are lacking more generally

accepted ways to describe effectiveness of open educational resources

is that the OER movement was founded on a belief — sharing knowledge is a good thing — and not much more.

There was no clearly defined goal, not even a clearly defined problem

that this movement was created to address. What the community is

lacking is a shared goal, why we are developing all this stuff. If we

had a shared goal and then some smaller goals to support the overall

one, we would have a better idea what we are doing this for.

She went on to suggest one (actually two) such goals: Increasing the

amount of knowledge in the world, and more equitably distributing it.

As a result there would be more that we know about the world and how to

make it a good place, and more people know it and have access to the

power that comes from knowing it. I am paraphrasing her – she was more

eloquent than my typing was able to keep up with.

While I like the way she describes the goals, I do not agree that they

have been absent. Maybe they haven’t been as clearly expressed as the

goals of the free software movement were laid out by Richard Stallman

early on — but many of the projects that are part of the OER movement

do in fact increase the amount of knowledge in the world and more equitably distribute it.

The OER movement has many facettes, and different people and

organisations participate for very different reasons. There are first

efforts to identify a shared narrative — for example through the [Cape

Town Open Education Declaration](http://capetowndeclaration.org) — and these will provide a map of the

landscape that projects can relate to, but we have seen that the belief

in a powerful idea — that sharing knowledge is a good thing — can

provide enough common ground (or is it shared ground) for many

incredible things to happen. 10 years ago, who would have thought that

there would be over 6000 courses published openly online, that there

would be an online encyclopedia that reaches beyond the size and

quality of traditional encyclopedias, and that we would be using

software developed by open communities of volunteer contributors to

make it all happen? All of these things increase the amount of

knowledge in the world and help to more equitably distribute it. Maybe

it took a empiricist like Candice to take a hard look at the movement,

and verbalise what the community had been doing all along, without

being fully aware of it.

Posted on September 28, 2008