Page:A Basic Guide to Open Educational Resources.pdf/43

 In terms of the initiative’s envisaged model of an ‘open university’ created by innovative partnerships among like-minded higher education institutions, the aim is to offer ‘robust and credible solutions for providing assessment and credentialisation services’ (TEKRI 2011:2) so that students may ‘readily have their learning assessed and subsequently receive appropriate academic recognition for their efforts’ (TEKRI 2011:1).

Primary economic proposition #2
The second economic proposition posed by OER is a riskier challenge – to abandon the pervasive economic logic that education should be treated as a business, governed by the same rules and incentives as the commercial and retail sector. The notion of education as a free market has had many negative consequences. For the past few decades, educators and educational institutions have been rewarded for competing with one another and withholding their intellectual property from others. Considered critically, this seems clearly antithetical to the notions of building and sharing knowledge, notions that are central, at least in principle, to the core function of educational institutions (at least, public ones). Over the past few decades, education has increasingly come to be understood as a business and a cost centre, the objective of which is to drive costs down – whether it be the cost of running universities and schools or the price of producing graduates.

Although the concept of OER itself will do nothing to change these realities, it offers an opportunity to reconsider the economic value proposition of education. It provides a reason to change institutional and national policies and budgetary frameworks so that they reward collaboration and open sharing of knowledge, rather than either penalizing it (by removing possible streams of income when knowledge is shared openly) or ignoring it (as so many universities do by rewarding research publication over other pursuits such as time spent in designing educational programmes, participating in collaborative materials development processes, and making produced materials freely available for others to use). This suggests a need to place strong emphasis on institutional policy engagement, because, until rewards systems are restructured, there is little prospect for persuading people to change their behaviour.

No matter what technologies or methodologies may be used, the simple reality is that good education cannot be created or sustained without spending properly on it. Investment in education can only ever be meaningfully justified in terms of the long-term social and economic benefits that it will bring societies, not in terms of how those investments will help to enrol more students at progressively declining unit costs.

Of course, if OER is understood as just another mechanism to cut costs, this time by providing free content, its potential to contribute to improving education will be lost and it will be consigned to the long list of faddish jargon and buzzwords that have plagued higher education for so many years. If such a path were to