Open Learning Network

The OER Course Collaboratory is an international collaboration among individuals and education institutions to create, reuse, revise and remix OERs specifically for courses on open education which you can teach at your own institution without restrictions. Our aim is to widen access to knowledge and capacity building in the open education field. 

When we stare at our televisions in the evening maybe we don't think of them as places were we could use Open Educational Resources (OER). After all, this is a world where you have to be a big organisation to produce and transmit content, and for most people their involvement will be limited to passive consumption. Until now that is. Many changes are happening that mean people are taking control with their remotes. Opportunities are even emerging to experiment with shifting OER from the laptop to the living room, and it is not as difficult to get involved as you might think.

In the OLnet team we lately started a collaborative process of "reflecting" on Open Educational Resources reuse/remix challenges. In order to understand what these challenges may be we tried to answer to the following main questions:

Why reusing/remixing and Open Educational Resource?

What are the barriers to reusing/remixing OERs?

In 2004, WIRED magazine’s November issue featured a CD with Creative Commons licensed music by Beastie Boys, My Morning Jacket, David Byrne, Chuck D and others, music which was also hosted on a new website, called ccMixter.org. ccMixter is a project supported by Creative Commons and more specifically Lucas Gonze, Neeru Paharia and Mike Linksvayer. Creative Commons is a non-profit organisation that is dedicated to making it easier for people to share and remix their work with others, providing free licenses and relevant legal tools for the authors creative work and for others to share and remix.

One of the ideas in the world of Open Educational Resources (OERs) that can be a bit strange to grasp at first is the idea of “remixing”. When I first joined the OLnet project and was telling people about it, a mention of remixing would often prompt people to ask “why would I want to do that?”, a perfectly reasonable question as many will have just experienced education as courses they learn from, but wouldn't actually change. Often OERs are just thought of as free courses, but remixing creates a much bigger opportunity. So I thought I would draw on the collective wisdom of the OLnet team and compile a list of twenty reasons to remix an OER.