OLNet+-+Problem+Statement

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One of the great promises of Open Educational Resources is their ability to be reused because of the rights that open licenses grant and the minimal costs to replicate and share electronic media in general. [i] In the realm of informal sharing, anecdotal stories abound about the reuse of freely and openly licensed shared resources, often backed up with numbers from individually controlled, commodity web analytic services. [ii] These help foster the “power of positive narcissism,” [iii] providing additional evidence to individual content owners of the value of sharing. Such evidence has been much harder to find within formal OER projects. Very few of the systems deployed to share OER provide views and reuse metrics back to the content owners. In the case of OER “repository” models that share content that has been removed from its original context of use, and share it in such a way that the content can be downloaded and used in totally new contexts (instead of merely linked in place), very little is known of what becomes of downloaded resources and how often they are reused. This lack of data is a critical failing in providing evidence of actual benefit. It also greatly undercuts individual motivations to share, which are often buttressed by evidence of actual reuse.

[i] Smith, Marshall S. and Casserly, Catherine, “The Promise of Open Educational Resources,” William and Flora Hewlett Foundation , 2006, http://learn.creativecommons.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/changearticle.pdf Retrieved January 15, 2010. [ii] cf. Levine, Alan, “Amazing Stories of Openness” http://cogdog.wikispaces.com/AmazingStories Retrieved January 15, 2010 or Lamb, Brian “Tales of Openness” [] Retrieved January 15, 2010. [iii] Lamb, Brian “The power of positive narcissism does it again,” [] Retrieved January 15, 2010.

OLNet Research Questions //Reuse of OER// //5. a. Are OER being reused by teachers – track from demand side but could try sampling teaching to see if there is any evidence of OER in the teaching materials that students see.// //5. b. Automated ways to track OER such as watermarks. Persistence and comparison of original with derived.//