Open Educational Resources and the value for higher education in
the subject of Early Childhood Education and Care.
What are Open Education Resources?
Recent years have seen the increased interest in Open Educational Resources (OERs). The term Open
Educational Resources was first introduced at a conference hosted by UNESCO in 2000 where it was
promoted in the context of providing free access to educational resources on a global scale (Yuan
2011). ‘Open’ is generally meant to mean that the resources are freely available to others for reuse in
different contexts. Defined by McMartin (2007 p132) as
‘Digitalised educational materials and tools freely offered for educators, students and self-learners to use
and reuse for the purpose of teaching learning and research’.
Hilton and Wliey (2010) provide a useful framework for considering the level of openness.
 Reuse. This is the most basic level of openness, where an item can be used as part of work or
for your own purpose e.g. the use of a Youtube video in a lecture.
 Redistribute. Items you openly share with others e.g. a digitalised article sent via email to a
colleague.
 Revise. Modifying, translating or changing a form of the work e.g. translating an article written
in French into an English audio book.
 Remix. Combining two or more existing resources to make a new resource e.g. using an audio
file from one course and combining with a video file from another.
(see Figure 1)
Figure 1
Increasing openness
Reuse, Revise, Remix
and Redistribute
Reuse and
Redistribute
only
Reuse
(Hilton and Wliey 2010)
There are several examples of institutes and individuals opening educational resources for others,
perhaps the most well known is MIT’s OpenCourseWare Program which provides open materials for
over 1800 courses (Hilton & Wiley 2010). The development of OERs has been growing steadily in
recent years, there are now reported to be materials from more than 3000 open access courses (open
courseware) currently available from over 300 universities worldwide (OECD 2007) :
In the UK, the Open University’s OpenLearn project offers free access to over 600 courses (OU 2011).
Why open your resources to others?
There are a number of reasons why you may want to openly share your teaching resources or
academic literature with others:
Increased exposure. One of the benefits of sharing your work as an OER is that your work will be
shared with considerably more people, which increases the exposure to your work. This has the
benefit of allowing you to develop an academic reputation in your field of study.
Altruism. Sharing you work with others who may not have access to higher education or tools for
learning could be considered to be an act of charity. Whilst education within the UK appears to be
closing its doors to wider participation, the OER movement is opening many opportunities to
education. Steve Jobs the founder of Apple notoriously dropped out of college, instead he ‘dropped in’
to lessons that excited and interested him, much of this informal learning he brought to Apple. He
states we would not have the great array of fonts we have now had he not dropped in to calligraphy
sessions in College (Jobs 2005).
Giving new life to out of print work. Boyle (2007) states that a significant problem in the publishing
world relates to ‘orphan books’. These are books that are out of print and the author cannot be easily
located. Posting the book to a website can bring new life to a book that would otherwise disappear
from public view.
A sharing place for Grey Literature. The term Grey Literature is used variably by the intellectual
community to refer to a body of original materials that cannot be found easily through conventional
channels such as publishers. These can include technical reports from government agencies or
scientific research groups and working papers from research groups. The identification of grey
literature can be difficult. Often the author, publication date and publishing organisation may not be
easily discernable but the information gained may be invaluable. Storing grey literature as an open
source can help with dissemination and have the benefit for the author of increased exposure.
Improving the quality of educational resources. Openly publishing learning materials to the
maximum level of openness can leave them open to peer review and modification by many others in
the field.
The value of developing and using OERs in Early Childhood Education and Care
The true value of OERs for the Early Childhood sector, maybe the opportunity for learning from other
countries, cultures and settings. Sharing policy practice and research in Early childhood education
and care (ECEC) could provide a framework for international comparisons, which may enhance
concepts developed within a country and open up the possibility of new ways and alternatives to
approaching ECEC in other countries (Meluish & Petrogiannis 2006). At the moment there are limited
open resources in the field of early childhood and yet early childhood as a tradition of sharing and
celebrating international practices e.g. Reggio and Te Whariki. The aim of early childhood education
and care is to provide a good start for very young children around the world regardless of status or
means. OER’s can offer a share point for good practice and for learning from each other, which can
only help us to achieve that aim.
Links:
OER Africa Early Childhood/Foundation Studies
http://www.oerafrica.org/teachered/EarlyChildhoodandFoundationStudies/tabid/1563/Defa
ult.aspx
OpenLearn Childhood and Youth
http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/category.php?id=25
References
Boyle J S. (2007) The public domain: Enclosing the commons of the mind. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press. In Hilton J III, Wiley D.A. (2010) The creation and use of open educational resources
in Christian higher education, Christian Higher Education, 9, pp49-59.
Hilton J III, Wiley D.A. (2010) The creation and use of open educational resources in Christian higher
education, Christian Higher Education, 9, pp49-59.
Jobs S (2005) Stanford address. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc accessed Nov
2011
McMartin F (2008) Open educational content: Transforming access to education. In T Iiyoshi & M.S.
Kumar (Eds) Opening up education (pp135-148) M A: MIT Press.
Melhuish E. Petrogiannis K (2006) Early Childhood Care and Education ; International Perspectives.
London, Routledge.
Open University (OU) (2011) OpenLearn. http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2007). Giving knowledge for free:
The emergence of open educational resources.
Yuan L (2011) What are open educational resources? Open educational resource, infokit. JISC.
https://openeducationalresources.pbworks.com/ Accessed Nov 2011.