The true culmination of the OER movement, in my opinion at least, was the Paris OER declaration in 2012. Although it was made out to be an attempt at promoting the movement, it served the greater good of pointing out for the first time what was weak in this ideology. Sixteen or so areas emerged which painted OER in a new light forcing many of us to really squint our eyes and look beyond the hype. As such, since 2012, the use and reuse of OER has been widely debated as quite a challenging agenda.
In the world of MOOC, many OER advocates and practitioners have switched sides to look at educating the masses from a different perspective. Arguably OER are a major part of the MOOC movement but not a defining one. Rather, the OER movement has started a retrospective journey looking at what was deemed to be good about it before the bandwagon started doing its rounds. Among the areas being revisited are pedagogy, actual reuse of resources, “licensing”, curation and most importantly business models for sustainability.
Due to the fickle nature of any philanthropy, the OER movement has really been forced to look at how it can sustain itself for the years to come. Some pioneers have already taken a page out of the FOSS movement to redefine the word OPEN in OER omitting the monetary connotation and maintaining only the ideological implication. Furthermore, much emphasis has been placed on the actual curation or archiving of these materials in a sensible manner following established metadata standards for more efficient reuse.
The world now realises that it has enough open material without a way to effectively classify them according to the actual “usefulness” for teaching and learning purposes. Quite a bit of research is currently underway in this area, surprisingly by computer scientists in contrast to the educationists who gave the movement its initial thrust. Now the terms big data, sentiment analysis, learning analytics and text mining among others dominate most of the research in OER. As time passes, many of these research project will move towards MOOC which seem to be, at least as it stands, a more sensible way of educating the world. However, there are still those of us who cling onto the dream of OER oblivious to the fact that evolution has left revolution dead in its tracks and the gravy train has already come and left.
