Abstract
There is scant evidence of OER reuse or sharing; OER apologists maintain that reuse is happening in private spaces, but others argue there is no evidence of such ‘dark reuse’.The OER lifecycle provides a model of OER engagement, defining five key practices: finding, composing, adapting, reusing and sharing. However, no empirical research has yet investigated whether teachers’ engagement with OER follows this model; evidence from OER repository analytics suggests not.This paper draws on an empirical study of engagement with an OER repository by language teachers at a distance university (The Open University UK). Through the applied thematic analysis of data generated through observation of lesson preparations, the paper’s contribution is to validate the OER lifecycle model and provide evidence of ‘dark reuse’. Qualitative tools, sensitive to the situated nature of OER engagement, are crucial to understanding invisible practices around ‘dark reuse’, and sophisticated models that embrace the complexity of OER ecosystems are needed.
Highlights
In the OER discourse, the promise of the OER movement is that the world’s knowledge is a public good, and that it can be harnessed and shared through technology so that everyone can use it and reuse it as they wish (Smith & Casserly, 2006)
The teachers in this study were observed on a one-to-one basis as they prepared two lessons, engaging in professional conversations with the researcher around the choice of resources for the lesson, and any changes they were making to the resources
Number 6 8 9 10 12 12 13 13 13 15 18 22. Out of those 151 resources, more than 40% came from the institutional OER repository, LORO, just over 30% were created by an individual teacher, and 15.8% of the resources came from other teachers (Table 2)
Summary
In the OER discourse, the promise of the OER movement is that the world’s knowledge is a public good, and that it can be harnessed and shared through technology so that everyone can use it and reuse it as they wish (Smith & Casserly, 2006). In the past fifteen years, considerable philanthropic funding has been devoted to creating a wealth of free educational resources and collections. It appears that the promise of OER has not been fully realised, and the anticipated adoption, reworking and sharing has had only limited success. Gurell (2008) provided an early model of engagement with OER and defined five key practices, namely finding, composing, adapting, and, crucially, reusing and sharing OER.
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