Theme 3: OERs challenges (macro)

While the discoverability of resources is unanimously considered a challenge in the OER ecosystem, other fundamental challenges were mentioned, which help to collocate the focused activities of this research in their broader context.

Awareness of OER benefits

PartC considered, based on his own experience managing course developers, that it is still necessary to motivate the use of OERs, and to find convincing arguments about their advantages:

You need to make it clear what the value of sharing is. [PartC]

PartA, from his perspective as a search engine designer, considered instead that this goal was already achieved:

OERs have mainstreamed. Educators have been on defence about open resources but now they say “I see the value of this”… [PartA]

and that the challenge is now rather their discoverability:

but discoverability has not kept pace with the number of resources [PartA]

Both PartC and PartA, however, despite their different perspective, noted that the lack of a price attached to OERs, might be psychologically associated to a lack of value:

Perhaps, in certain contexts, OERs are perceived to have no value, as they have no price attached. [PartC]

Quality has always been an issue with open resources because you know in the US there is an old saying "you get what you pay for", and so people everywhere typically believe

that something free is probably not as good as something you pay for. [PartA]

PartB argued that there is now plenty of evidence, in the literature, demonstrating the advantages of OERs against traditional resources, not just because they are cheaper, but because they can help students achieve better results:

Research shows that OERs save student’s money, increase student success, reduce dropout rate, increase course completion rates, reduce time to degree [PartB]

However, as demonstrated by the living experience of PartC and PartA, this has not always, as yet, sank in the commonly established opinion – which is the reason why the Ljubljana Action Plan still recommends to raise awareness about the benefits of OERs.

Indeed, even PartB himself mentioned, among other challenges for OERs, the lack of awareness:

A lack of awareness about OERs and Open Education among educators [PartB]

which requires educators to be supported:

The need to support busy teachers and faculty to use and create open content [PartB]

Use of open formats

Finally, PartB mentioned another fundamental limitation, concerning the need to work in a common environment and with open formats:

We need a space where we can collectively build, share, modify and update open content, with open formats [PartB]

Indeed, openly licensed content is not always available in open formats that other educators can easily repurpose which limits its effectiveness.

Sustainability of the OER ecosystem

The well-known challenge of sustainability of the OER ecosystem was clearly acknowledged:

The lack of sustainability of existing activities is a serious evident challenge [PartC]

Various possible reasons causing this situation were mentioned:

[The lack of sustainability] is possibly due to short term funding, lack of coordination, short-term planning and lack of thinking about sustainability, competition, lack of

awareness of the advantages… [PartC]

PartA, considering its experience in developing a small-scale search engine, focused on the problem of scale:

Small initiatives at this stage cannot have a relevant impact [PartA]

May be some of those people need to pull back and put some of their (individual) efforts into starting pulling things together [PartA]

This excessive proliferation of small-scale activities, indeed, was certainly useful to the expansion of the open movement, but it may be now partly responsible for an unhealthy fragmentation of the ecosystem. This exacerbates the challenge of sustainability, for which no one seems to have a solution yet (UNESCO, 2017).

Fragmentation and coordination

Fragmentation was already discussed, at micro level, under the theme “Overall assessment of the proposed strategy and strengths”, where participants praised the strategy to offer high-level reusable functionalities on top of other search engines. Fragmentation was partially discussed at meso level under the “Metadata standardization” theme too, where the need to refrain from developing too many

competitive standards was discussed. Finally, fragmentation was discussed under the theme “Metadata direct and indirect sharing", where it was argued about the need to avoid an unhealthy proliferation of platforms, and provide an open service-oriented infrastructure fostering collaboration rather than competition.

At macro level, participants indicated various solutions that could help reducing the problem of fragmentation, increasing the sustainability of the ecosystem. The need for more coordination was frequently mentioned:

Some of those people need to pull back [from individual efforts] and put some of their efforts into starting pulling things together [PartA]

Funders of developers of OERs should require coordination efforts, among institutions and individuals [PartC]

There is a need for organization, international agreements, and well-funded key people in the open-ed community [PartA]

You need a coordination of some kind [PartC]

PartA argued that it is possible, indeed, to achieve sustainability by suitable coordination of the activities, because this was already successfully demonstrated by the Open Software communities:

Coordination of the multiple initiatives is possible. Indeed, while the top level coordinating structure is the challenge, there are examples of success in the open

software, where large complex systems have been crowdsourced. [PartA]

Market involvement

While competition was mentioned as something that should be avoided,

Need to avoid competition [PartC]

the involvement of the private sector was not excluded:

I have been heavily involved in the open source movement since the nineties, and there are a lot of parallels there that if we close off commercial interest, then it is not truly

open either [PartD]

On the contrary, some participants considered that there is an opportunity for collaboration between the public and private sectors:

There are things that the State is not very good at, and there is room for the private sector [PartB]

Some of us who are open zealous have this unhealthy fear of a commercial entity and we need to have some collaboration between us. [PartD]

However, it was considered important that resources developed with public money, should be made openly available to the public:

I think it is on public funded organizations to make sure we don't lose access to these resources [PartD].

The public should have access to what the public paid for [PartB]

Language barrier

The language barrier already surfaced in the discussion of the first theme, concerning possible improvements to Discoverer, but it is certainly a much broader key challenge. PartD, a bilingual educator working in a non-English speaking country, highlighted it:

The language barrier is definitely a big problem […] and we put ourselves in silos working in single languages, so that is difficult. [PartD]

This concern was also voiced by non-English speaking educators participating in previous evaluations of the prototypes. From my personal experience as a trainer and educators in various non-English speaking countries, I can only support this fundamental concern, which is fully acknowledged in the Ljubljana Action Plan.