I'm sharing my personal experience here with respect to developing courses using OER as a preamble to my post OER Based ODL Course Material - Web Database Application. The following gives the background of what went into the development of the now published OER based ODL course.
Wawasan Open University (WOU), Malaysia, took a bold step last year towards developing its self study ODL course material using OER by coming up with an institutional policy on the use of OER. Since then (for around 8 months now) I have been working to put together a technical course material on “Web Database Applications” (a second year specialist technical course of a BTech (Hons) Degree) using OER. Although it might sound easy to do, I found it to be quite challenging. However with a few people who are believers of the OER movement I’m glad to say that we have completed all the five units of this five credit course with considerable quality.
To very briefly share with all of you how we did it, we first put together a team of people who are excellent techis and are passionate about the use of OER (this was the most challenging part as the mix had to be perfect for this to work). Then we located the OER resources we would be using in the course material. To ensure quality, we crossed referred the OER material with the actual technical manuals (not OER), textbooks and made sure that two more techis in addition to the course writer (who himself is a techi) verified the content. I’m not saying that the content will be 100% error free but it will be quite close. Then the whole course material went through the instructional design process which made it suitable for adult ODL students.
Now let me share the cost implications; the normal process of creating a course material (not based on OER) at WOU costs quite a bit of money for the University as payments need to be made to the course writers and course reviewers in addition to the time of the in-house academics, instructional designers, graphic designers etc. The course material developed using the OER material incurred the same costs for us. Thus there was no immediate saving with respect to the development cost of the course material. However, when considering that this new course will also be offered as an OER material, other institutions can save on the development cost by using this material directly. The same will apply to WOU as well as it will have the opportunity to save costs by using OER course material developed by other Universities (ideal scenario).
Therefore, in my opinion and from an institutional perspective, there are no immediate cost savings to be had by developing courses using OER. In fact it seems like the University is spending such a large amount of money to develop course material which it will giveaway for free under the CC license. This however is the micro picture of it. The macro picture clearly shows that if institutions talk to each other, collaborate and contribute to the pool of courses in OER format, there will be significant cost savings to be had in the future. The challenge is however to convince the management of a university to spend money on courses to be given away for free in anticipation of a promised cost savings in the future. In other words to take the "leap of faith". This is the toughest part of the whole exercise (in my opinion of course).
