Sharing Nicely

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 — 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.