Ken and John, appreciate your thoughtful responses in this thread. Regarding access, while what you've noted about participation is true, take a look at what's in our paper (live at http://www.distanceandaccesstoeducation.org/contents/JALN_v12n1_Geith.pdf ) and I think you'll see why it's not clear that online has increased access to degrees - albeit that's just one definition of access.
Seems to me that online to this point is an incremental innovation to existing practice - and that's a good thing - but it's not the disruptive innovation to the system of higher education that it was once thought to be. It has clearly increased convenience, yet the vast majority of low-income students in the U.S. still do not achieve degrees and costs continue to rise. So, its impact does not yet appear to be big enough to put a dent in some of our big problems. I think that it can, and I'd watch the for-profits and adult-serving institutions for examples.
Regarding the notion of “true north” - what exactly are we talking about asks John. First, for background, I recommend these two papers:
Giving Knowledge for Free by the OECD http://213.253.134.43/oecd/pdfs/browseit/9607041E.PDF
OLCOS Roadmap 2012 http://www.olcos.org/english/roadmap/
My perspective is that “North” is decision making about intellectual property that is based on a notion of abundance, not scarcity. The world today has plenty of scarcity, but I'm talking about an abundance on the Internet of information as well as experts. Making even more abundance through sharing, and operating as though there were already abundance, is “North” in my mind.
What does this mean? For one, when creating intellectual property in the form of structured learning resources (i.e. educational resources) do not assume that their value is in making them scarce and then charging for access through publishers or through courses. In an era of abundance of resources and experts, it is likely that there is even more value in sharing them openly and benefiting in other ways, indirectly, from the act of sharing. Structuring and crafting information and resources for the purposes of teaching and learning is extremely valuable in the context in which they are used. It is the context that makes them valuable - it is the context that is scarce. Those same resources are also useful outside of their original context - for other purposes by other people in other contexts. Why not share the resources and contribute to the growing abundance? This notion has been described as the knowledge commons.
I think of OER as another layer of organization on the Internet - another layer that makes information more valuable through its structure. What will we build on top of this layer? What value-added services and contexts will emerge around the commons? What will emerge to enhance education? - Free textbooks? Free courses? Tutoring services? New ways to earn credit?
There are many elements of the commons notion that have not yet emerged that would seem to make it all work: good search tools, filters and recommender systems for one; new ways to vet quality for another; tracking systems (like the “chain of custody” John described) for another. No doubt, these are coming. Google and Creative Commons are working on a search engine, for example http://learn.creativecommons.org/.
Also, for this OER knowledge commons to operate similar to OSS economically, we need corporate interests, such as publishers, to participate like IBM did in Linux. See this paper by Bruce Perens for background on the economic model of OSS http://perens.com/Articles/Economic.html.
Getting back to John's comments, OER are pieces and parts of an education experience. They are not – at least not yet - the complete experience and should not be compared to online learning with all of its contextrich social, cognitive and teacher components. Unfortunately, many proponents and practitioners involved in OER are unfamiliar with the research and best practices in online learning and distance education before that. This is an opportunity for online learning veterans to bring more people on board and to help shape the OER movement. Yet, we also need to keep in mind that OER is a further disaggregation of institution-based online learning where student admissions through to graduation are usually integrated functions. We need to look at the opportunities of OER from a different perspective.
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