OER-phoria

"Sunrise Acrobatics" by Zach Dischner is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

I was sitting in Zoom class with OER-expert Dr. David Wiley, who teaches one class every other year in the Master’s program I am enrolled in, along with eight other students, when I got caught up in OER-phoria.  The realization that copyright was straight jacketing contemporary culture and creativity and that open licenses could democratize education globally was mind-blowing.  Now, David Wiley was in no way encouraging any band-wagon hopping. There were no drums, but I felt ready to march.  There was no flag, but I was ready to wave one high in the air.  In fact, I may or may not have handed in a creative assignment where I wrote a song about the benefits and challenges of OER through the years set to the tune of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”  Though it was meant to be funny, I had forgotten during the pandemic that I was not a gifted singer.  I fear it registered somewhere in the area of “memorable but cringey.”   Despite that, I truly felt the class was life-changing.  

As I began rubbing shoulders with other OER scholars and reading about the cost-savings, outcome-maintaining, and pedagogy-altering impact of OER, I felt like I was scaling the OER mountain, getting closer and closer to the vista of education for everybody everywhere.  I really was inspired. I went all the way to Ghana last summer on a project to get mobile hotspots to low-bandwidth areas.  These were fully-loaded with OER, such as Khan Academy, Wikipedia, and other OER content, ready to be downloaded in an instant for anyone within 200 ft that had a phone.  I designed my thesis research around how OER is localized.  I had signed on to the Cause.

In fact, it wasn’t until I was in my thesis prospectus defense, that the biggest blow to my OER-phoria was dealt.  My loss of naivety had been coming on gradually through my literature review and my experience in Ghana.  I read Wiley’s blog post, “The Localization Paradox,” (2021), in which he asserts that some revising and remixing could unknowingly change OER for the worse.  True. I attended Open Education 2021 and listened to scholars from other parts of the world addressing problems of decontextualization and ill-fit and colonialism (Adeyeye & Mason, 2020).  I had designed OER content, and I recognized that the pdf that was simple enough to share was ultimately inflexible and unusable for revising, remixing, and reusing.  No one in Ghana could edit the OER they downloaded.  Also, the mobile hotspots could ideally hold uploaded OER from creators in Ghana, but there was such a learning curve to be able to do this, that no one did.  You had to have some intermediate programming experience to pull it off, making the OER servers one-directional.  In an empty library, the resources were still highly valuable, but the one-sidedness felt significantly less democratic and ideal.

During my prospectus defense, then, Dr. Royce Kimmons gave me some really great feedback about looking at the liberal democratic assumptions inherent in my research positionality, in my questions, and in the OER movement in general.  OER comes from a fundamentally Western construct and may not be compatible with other cultural constructs.  As much as I have dived into issues of social justice (Lambert, 2018; Olivier, 2016), it hit me in a new way that OER is not the perfect key to open up a world engaged in revising, remixing, retaining, and redistributing.  Here I am looking at the practice of localization when that practice exists differently in other learners’ minds (Ivins, 2014).  I really need to think about whether or not I am wrongfully positioning myself as an OER researcher.  It’s more complicated and comes with more problems than I realized a year ago. Sigh.

And yet…while this young researcher is a little older and wiser about OER at this point, I feel comfortable in still hoping for a spirit of sharing when it comes to knowledge and education, even though sharing brings its challenges and tensions.  Since I have felt the passing of OER-phoria, I have talked to others about it.  In fact, it seems the passing of the euphoria is as common with OER as it is with anything else. However, I think it is possible for me to see the reality of OER as a strengthening of critical clarity rather than as the dimming of an ideal. Royce Kimmons also pointed out that if our critical analysis increases along with our enthusiasm, we are better positioned as researchers to deal with the problems of OER (Velestianos & Kimmons, 2022). This is where I am choosing to land the balloon...somewhere before disillusionment in critical optimism with a commitment to listen to how others feel about the sharing and receiving of OER.

Adeyeye, B. A., & Mason, J. (2020). Opening Futures for Nigerian Education – Integrating Educational Technologies with Indigenous Knowledge and Practices. Open Praxis, 12(1), 27. doi:10.5944/openpraxis.12.1.1055

Ivins, T. (2011). Localization of Open Educational Resources (OER) in Nepal: Strategies of Himalayan Knowledge-Workers [Doctoral Thesis, Brigham Young University]. BYU ScholarsArchive. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/2616/

Lambert, S. R. (2018). Changing our (Dis)Course: A Distinctive Social Justice Aligned Definition of Open Education. Journal of Learning for Development, 5(3), 225–244. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2722-9684

Oliveir, J. (2020). Self-directed open educational practices for a decolonized South African curriculum: a process of localization for learning. Journal of E-learning and Knowledge Society, 16(4), pp. 20-28.

Veletsianos, G. & Kimmons, R. (2022). Assumptions and Challenges of Open Scholarship. In R. Kimmons (Ed.), Becoming an Open Scholar. EdTech Books. https://edtechbooks.org/open_scholar/assumptions_and_challenges