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Higher Ed sponsored PLEs...an oxymoron?

Commentary by Downes (Stephen Downes) on link by AK, Higher Ed sponsored PLEs...an oxymoron?, February 24, 2011.

There's a discussion being conducted right now - Cable Green talked about it - under the heading of Open Educational Resources University, where this subject comes up explicitly. There are, it seems to me, two major schools of thought in the field - one in which OERs are 'produced' by publishers and universities, in order to ensure quality, etc., and funded through some sort of sponsorship program or even by charging students fees, and the other in which OERs are created by learners themselves and shared in a wider OER ecology. Not surprisingly, I subscribe to the second view. (Hits Today: 843 Total: 843)

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Re: Higher Ed sponsored PLEs...an oxymoron?

Gordon Lockhart, February 24, 2011
I'd actually subscribe to both views in the present state of play. Certainly, at the level of Higher Education I think that high quality OER usually associates with universities (eg. Open University, OpenLearn (UK), Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative (OLI) and of course MIT's OCW). Not that low quality material is absent from University OER, just that the proportion of difficult to find, incomplete, badly signposted, unpolished and inaccurate material seems higher elsewhere! The creation of good, reusable OER is hard work and although there are some promising initiatives, I think it's too early to see just how learner-created OER is going to fit into the overall picture.

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