OER and informal learning.

Provision of Course and Teaching Materials

The first generation of distance education institutions placed great emphasis on the creation of excellent teaching resources, in first print and later multi-media formats. This was in contrast (both in terms of time and money expended and resulting quality) to resources committed to classroom teaching. Typically classroom teachers, with the aid of a textbook or two and a set of informal lecture notes (now augmented by Powerpoint slides) produce individualized courseware, of variable quality and little or no editing or distribution. Both classroom and distance education courses are most often built upon the unbundled provision of a text book, created by commercial publishers and paid for, usually in addition to course fees, by the student.

The provision and widespread distribution of Open Educational Resources (OER) is beginning to disrupt both classroom and distance education models of courseware production and distribution. At present there are thousands of full post-secondary course modules available as OER online and tens of thousands of lesson modules in repositories such as the MIT-sponsored OCWC site, Rice Universitys Connexions, the Saylor Foundation, MERLOT, the Washington State Open Course Library, ARIADNE in Europe, and many others (Hylen, 2007). In addition, the US Department of Labor has made $2 billion available over four years for training initiatives that must use an open access license (Department of Labor, 2011). Access to this rapidly growing font of usable learning materials has already increased the quantity and quality of informal learning. Seely (2011) notes that OER have had the most visible impact on individual learning however increasingly classes of students are using OER materials. The MIT OCW site alone has more than one million unique visitors a month. According to their statistics, 45% are self-learners and nearly 42% are students at other universities (MIT, 2011). These numbers do not count other OER sites or even MIT OCW mirror sites. Tufts University estimates that more than half of their visitors are independent learners (Lee, Albright, OLeary, et al., 2008). As the quantity and quality of OER increases, they will become even more readily used by faculty. Already there is a large movement towards the use of open textbooks, primarily driven by their growing costs (US Government Accountability Office, 2005; Allen, 2010; Beshears, 2010).

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