Motivations and benefits
The primary motivation for the OER movement is the “powerful idea that the World’s knowledge is a public good.” The Web provides unprecedented opportunities to share that knowledge (Smith & Casserly, 2006) and reduces the costs of reproducing and distributing content to almost zero. (Caswell, Henson, Jensen, & Wiley, 2008) This altruistic driver is continually in the minds of those involved in the growing numbers of OER projects; educators already generally believe that learning is beneficial for their students and can easily get caught up with the idea that these benefits should be extended as widely as possible. While there are potential commercial motivations too, as will be discussed later, the desire to give something back to society is arguably the strongest driver for the organisations and individuals in the OER movement.
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By viewing materials that colleagues have created there is potential for noticing overlaps in topics which they teach and for generating new collaborations between departments. (Johnstone, 2005) 40% of faculty at MIT for example found OCW to be helpful for updating their courses, many also using the site for advising students. (Caswell, Henson, Jensen, & Wiley, 2008) At Tufts faculty use the OER website to plan their curricula, prepare for teaching or to learn themselves. (Lee, Albright, O'Leary, Terkla, & Wilson, 2008) In addition OERs provide multiple perspectives on the same subject (Stacey, 2007) for both educators and students, taking the learning beyond institutional or national boundaries. These are widely quoted as benefits of OER initiatives however such internal uses would also be possible with a learning management system, open to all staff but closed to external users.
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Running institutional OER initiatives
Initiating a successful OER initiative at an institution involves high levels of commitment from senior management and is likely to require significant start-up funding. A vision will be required for why the institution should be making its educational resources freely available. Funding from an external organisation can give added impetus to the venture and pilot projects to develop OERs can then be used to demonstrate the production processes required and the potential uses....
Conclusions
There is little doubt that educational resources will continue to be made available freely on an ever greater scale and that the OERs are already being used by large numbers of learners and educators around the World.
