OER Inflexibility.
We need to think differently about the 5 Rs of open educational resources.
Today I’m speaking at the OE Global 2020 Conference, so I’m devoting this post to the subject of my presentation.
The mantra of those devoted to open educational resources (OER) is the concept of the 5 Rs developed by David Wiley. It’s a very simple formula for identifying the permissions granted by creators of (learning) objects to users, namely the right to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute the material. (Being a German studies prof, I get a big kick out of the fact that in Germany these are known as the 5 Vs - that is some impressive translating.) People who create OER can use the Creative Commons licensing system to automatically grant these permissions to others. It’s a brilliantly simple way to give others free and unfettered access to your creations that they not only can make use of as is, but adapt to their particular contexts and circumstances.
Photo by Petr Ruzicka on Unsplash
Once you become interested in OER, you become very interested in it; for some it’s almost like a cult (they don’t call it a movement for nothing). It’s understandable: many educators are upset with the price that universities, publishers, and others place on education, something they rightly view as a right and to which barriers must be lowered, not raised. OER can reduce student costs substantially while providing them with bespoke learning materials. OER creation and adoption attract very progressive educators who are pushing the limits of what education can do. They seek out new avenues to educate their students and are not afraid to innovate, try something new, and to be on the lookout for the next idea to come along.
But they also adhere to the 5 Rs with slavish devotion. Once you’ve defined something like OER using a straightforward formula like the 5 Rs, you’re bound to stick to that definition and even enforce it, use it as the yardstick to measure all educational materials. This then earns some materials the “NOT OER” label. Not necessarily the kiss of death for that material, but it can feel like shunning.
It’s important to remember that, as a creator of a work who’s using the Creative Commons licensing to make it available to others, you’re not giving up ownership of the original work, you’re simply specifying the terms under which it can be used. All six CC licenses require that you be acknowledged as the creator. Then you have to make some choices: if you let the user adapt your work, you can decide if they have to share it under the same conditions as you shared it, and whether that adaptation can be commercialized. If you let the user use your work but not adapt it, you still have to decide if they can commercialize it.
According to 5 R orthodoxy, if you don’t let the user adapt your work (you want to it to be preserved as is, whole and integral), you’re only meeting 3 of the 5 R conditions - revise and remix have been removed from the equation. As a result, your resource isn’t considered OER. Charts from David Wiley and Creative Commons aren’t too subtle about making that point:
OER, the 5Rs, and Creative Commons by David Wiley is licensed under CC BY 4.0
These 5 R litmus tests can stigmatize perfectly good materials that might be quite useful in teaching and learning. There are numerous instances when an instructor might not want users to adapt or revise their materials. For example, if you’re providing an interpretation of a novel, you may wish to see your argument preserved in its entirety so that it isn’t misrepresented in some way. (Not that the user would intentionally do this, but it can happen easily enough.) Or maybe you’re working with students and including their contributions in the resource; it might be important to preserve their voice in that context. The inflexibility of the 5 Rs could prevent good material from being circulated more widely.
It’s true that the least restrictive of the CC licenses - CC BY, the license that requires attribution - is the easiest to use for OER. It’s also the preferred license of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), which is a little bit surprising given the sensitive nature of intellectual property issues. It’s a sign of the desire for openness when it comes to the sharing of knowledge, but even the BOAI acknowledges in its original declaration that the integrity of one’s scholarship must be respected: “The only constraint on reproduction and distribution [of intellectual scholarship], and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”
If you think of teaching as basically the transmission of received knowledge to students, you’re not going to be too bothered by this issue. But if you’re of the mindset that teaching is about creating knowledge and sharing it with students, or that it’s about co-creating knowledge with students and encouraging them to share it, this inflexibility can drive you to distraction because you realize that some open educators are more concerned about adhering to “the rules” than about giving people choice as to how they wish to share their creations. We all get stuck in certain ways of thinking, and that can be a shame when those ways become ossified. If any educational approach needs to remain nimble and responsive to new ways of perceiving just what education is and can be, it should be open education. We need to find ways of including materials that don’t meet each of the R criteria, but which meet enough of them to fulfill the spirit of open.
For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.
Post 45/60.