Because of its positive image, OER became a buzzword in the educational field and, as a result, many resources call themselves 'open' while lacking the fundamental characteristics of truly open resources. Sometimes, one might even speak of “Open-washing”. Similar to "GreenWashing," this is when organizations make dubious claims about their product to make it more appealing to customers' values. So what really makes a resource open? In this blog, we outline the benefits of OER and five criteria that can be used to determine how ‘open’ online learning resources actually are.
Why does it matter whether resources are open or not? Well, true Open Educational Resources (OER) present important benefits over copyrighted resources, for both learners and educational institutions. The fundamental right of having access to education is essential in open education. Major global organizations like UNESCO are supporting the implementation of OER for this reason. The accessibility of OER ensures that students anywhere can obtain learning material at any time. This helps to improve study results and shares knowledge among peers [1]. On top of that, OER are more adaptive which makes it much easier to suit content to a wide variety of purposes and needs [2]. Other advantages are that, over time and if shared well, OER are more cost-effective, versatile and transparent [3].
A final incredibly strong advantage of OER over copyrighted materials is that it prevents walled gardens and vendor lock-in. In a “Walled Garden”, everything works well and is wonderful inside the garden, which is open to you as long as you pay. But there is no value outside the garden: the materials cannot be exported, so they only work in that particular environment. Often, entrance to the environment starts relatively cheap. Over time, institutions will start to rely heavily on that environment and vendor. Then the commercial company decides to push hefty increases in price. You are angry and frustrated, but you cannot switch: you are “locked-in”. “Vendor lock-in” is a situation where an educational institution wants to switch to other providers or sources of learning materials, but cannot practically do so because the costs of switching involved would be too high. With OER, institutions regain control over their educational materials, which are essential to providing their educational offering.
Because of these benefits, OER have received much more attention in the past years. That has not gone unnoticed. In addition to organizations that have promoted OER for many decades, more and more traditional copyright publishers are also experimenting with new models and inclusive access. The more organizations that host and promote OER, the better! But at the same time, the different forms of pursuing OER pose challenges for those trying to distinguish what’s truly open.
The challenge is when companies market themselves one way, while acting in a different way. In the OER context, this is sometimes referred to as “Open-washing.” This term is derived from a similar term in the climate and sustainability sector - Greenwashing - when some companies market themselves as being green and environmentally-friendly, without changing their regular practices. Open-washing damages the reputation and trust that learners, educators, and institutions have given OER. Therefore, it’s vital that we establish clear guidelines on what should and should not be considered open.
That raises the question: when exactly is something open? Unfortunately, there is a lot of gray area.
Here are some real-life examples:
The essential requirement for OER, is that they are licensed in such a way that others can use the materials and know what they are allowed to do with the materials without having to contact its creators. A well-known framework that adds clarity was created by David Wiley and is called “the 5Rs” [4]: five rights that creators can provide to third parties:
One can choose to provide one or more of these five rights to the public. In order to make it practical and easy to do, the Creative Commons organization offers several licenses that combine a number of these rights. This leads to 6 + 1 Creative Commons (CC) licenses (the seventh is CC0) which have become the de facto standard for licensing Open Educational Resources. Most of the educational sector agrees: if you state that your learning materials are open, they need to be properly CC licensed.
Educational materials that are published under open licenses such as Creative Commons, providing users with clear rights for reuse, retaining, revising, remixing and redistribution are definitely closer to open on the closed-to-open spectrum. But even then, ambiguities remain. For example, CC provides a non-commercial (NC) license to indicate that the material can be used and republished, as long as the nature of the activity is not commercial. But Creative Commons clearly states that this is about the activity, not the user. So commercial companies (with a fair and Open Business Model [5]) can use and host non-commercial resources. This is tricky territory. Commercial publishers and vendors may misuse this option to call materials open, while still using a model that leads to lock-in and a loss of accessibility and inclusion, in particular for underprivileged learners.
Based on numerous discussions on this topic in recent years (building on even more experience from the wonderful and passionate Open Education community) we have formulated five characteristics to assess whether resources are truly open:
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