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Jan Hylén reports back from:
A meeting of a European Commission funded project called Open eLearning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS), held on 14-15 June in Vienna.
The meeting was attended by OLCOS six partners: Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft, Austria; Fernuniversität Hagen, Germany; Open University of Catalonia, Spain; Mediamaesteri Group, Finland; European Centre for Media Competences, Germany; and European Distance and E-Learning Network (EDEN). Other invited experts (than from CERI) came from Humboldt University in Germany; CCLRC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in UK; Vienna University of Business and Economics in Austria; and Fernuniversität Hagen in Germany.
The objective of OLCOS is to build a virtual (online) information and observation centre for promoting the concept, production and usage of open educational resources, with special respect to open digital content in Europe. It is a two year project that started in January 2006 and will run through 2007.
Among the expected results of the project are:
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A roadmap 2012, illustrating the possible path(s) towards more value, production and usage of Open Educational Resources in the future. It should provide orientation about possible measure and actions to support decision making at the level of educational policy and institutions;
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Several online tutorials, providing information and guidance on how to practically work with the concept of OER;
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Awareness raising workshops about how to foster the concept of OER and the need for providing a legally sound infrastructure and changing educational policies and organisational strategies.
As experts we were invited to give our views on the definition OLCOS have formulated of open educational content, the added value of using OER, the outline of a vision and roadmap towards 2012 developed by the project. Although OLCOS have used a slightly different wording in their definition of OER, it became obvious in the discussions that OLCOS views on the conceptual issues are very close to the ones developed by UNESCO and adopted in the CERI OER project, and that OLCOS may take on a more elaborated definition proposed by CERI later on.
The issue on the added value of using OER overlapped a discussion on incentives for institutions and individuals for being involved in OER. On top of the common understanding of the added value of OER (easy access, flexibility, cost savings) there was a general agreement among the experts that commercial use of OER and attempts from institutions to find new revenue models in this area, should not be excluded by definition. Even though one might not want digital learning resources to be a gateway for a stronger commercialisation of education, it would probably not be wise to exclude such behaviour from studies and discussions in this early stage of the OER movement.
There was also a consensus among the experts on the importance of learning resources to be accessible and possible to find. The value of tagging resources with metadata is obvious, the big question is how to find resources or processes for managing it. The idea of using “folksonomies” – a collaboratively generated, open-ended labeling system on the Internet – as an alternative to predefined metadata schemes was mentioned, but whether it is possible to apply to this area is still unknown.
One of the expected outcomes of OLCOS is a vision of the use of open content by 2020, with a roadmap to 2012 as a first deliverable. Some preliminary ideas of the roadmap and the vision were presented.
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