As someone who is just beginning to learn more about OERs, I'm not sure how to answer the question of whether it's living up to its promise, since I'm not exactly sure what its promise is. After reading some initial background materials (the OCWC site and the Cape Town OED site), the promise of OER is not that much clearer to me. As others have already pointed out, its impact apparently will be felt in places where educators lack resources but have the motivation to take advantage of access to free content. To get a better assessment about the perceived impact of OER, I'd go and ask some of the signatories of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration why they signed it. Why are there so many signatories from Poland, for example? What do they see in it?
The main issue I have with OER at the moment is that education is about a lot more than content, as Gary and others have pointed out. The OCW Consortium Institution Memorandum of Cooperation (the document which truly defines what it means to participate in making OERs available through OCWC; see http://www.ocwconsortium.org/ocwcforum/docs/MOC_Institution_090406_OCWC.pdf ) specifies that “high-quality university level educational materials” implicitly vetted by higher education institutions is the admission ticket to the OCWC. Based on this definition, OERs are a relatively small piece of the entire puzzle. Education is an entire infrastructure in which content resources are an important component but certainly not the only one.
OERs appear to be very useful in some contexts, but hard to see how free content by itself will result in sweeping change - certainly not on the scale implied by the sweeping statements of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, particularly in its opening statement that “Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge.” Based on how OER is defined in the declaration, this statement reflects a confusion between education and knowledge and between education and learning, as if education is generated just by content-learner interaction. The second sentence is just plain pompous in its overreaching assumptions. When will everyone on the planet have access to this world of ubiquitious access? It reminds me of the label “No Child Left Behind,” frankly. It also assumes that OER will somehow become the focal point for human knowledge generation and that faculty-created and university-vetted course materials are the principal engine for human knowledge generation. I don't buy it - how is OER any more a world for generating human knowledge than Google or the Web itself?
Even as content, many OERs are of limited value. For example, the recent launch of Open Yale Courses exquisitely illustrates how educators can confuse content delivery with learning, with the result being open courseware of dubious quality. [also see http://senerlearning.com/?q=node/167]
Even with highly regarded open courseware such as offered by MIT's “international Internet guru” Professor Walter Lewin, [also see http://senerlearning.com/?q=node/171]
MIT itself has noted the limitations of this approach and is moving away from it with its residential students. [also see http://senerlearning.com/?q=node/172]
What's disappointing to me about the OCWC and CTOED sites so far is that I did not come away with a clear sense of what kind of impact OERs are making. So, perhaps OERs will have a huge impact for some learners and be an incremental innovation in other respects. Perhaps there are some unforeseen, serendipitous events which will change its effect. But I haven't yet seen any visible reasons to expect a huge impact. Has someone else?
BTW, I also disagree with the assertions that online learning in the U.S. “has not delivered on the promise of increased access” and has fared better for quality. There are now over three million online learners annually in U.S. higher education and probably over 12 million cumulatively since its inception. The majority of this has happened at community colleges, for which access is an integral part of their mission. How does this not represent an increase in access? While I think that online learning has finally succeeded in establishing a perception and reality of quality, IMO this still lags behind relative to its achievements in improving access. If online learning failed to deliver relative to some of its initial hype, the fault is with the hype.
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