Open Educational Resources (OER) offer great potential for reducing the cost of learning and allowing everyone to benefit from and contribute to an open, educational commons. However, in comparison to another example of the open movement, that of ‘open source’ software, in this author’s experience, there is significantly less creation, collaboration and consumption of OER.

This raises the question of why open source software may be more successful, and whether any of the factors that contribute to that success can be applied in the creation of OER.

Anderson (2013) suggests some practical barriers to OER success include:

An important open source principle is that source code – the human-readable text that defines the software – is freely available to copy and change (Opensource.org, 2007). Consequently, many different versions of the source code may exist. ‘Version control’ systems such as git (Git community, n.d.) allow contributions from different authors to be managed and reconciled, enabling collaborative development.

This decentralised, collaborative approach may mitigate issues of permanence, quality and time: removing dependence on any single author or repository, encouraging the involvement of multiple authors, reducing the size of contribution, range of skills or time investment required of any individual. Collaboration has long been recognised as important to sustainable OER development (Wolfenden, 2008) so these assumptions do not seem unreasonable.

Key to this approach is defining OER using a format amenable to human editing and version control, rather than the complex formats of tools such as WordPress or Microsoft Word. ‘Static website generators’ such as Jekyll (Jekyll Team, 2019) meet this requirement, and have been used successfully for scholarly publications and OER (Diaz, 2018), while Williamson (2018) argues they provide “everything you need to create, manage, and publish” OER.

The project seeks to test these claims by creating a trial set of OER delivered as a GitHub Pages (i.e. Jekyll) website with source material free to copy, adapt or contribute to through a GitHub (i.e. git) repository.

There are many high-quality free (but not open) resources available in this author’s discipline. The OER will wrap and scaffold – rather than duplicate – these resources, which may address the “ancillary resources” barrier identified earlier.

All resource development is in the open and all versions and variations of the resources are visible. The work may continue beyond the project as involvement is unrestricted and the tools required to contribute are freely available.

The presentation will demonstrate some techniques used in the project, review progress toward the expected benefits, and consider next steps for this project or similar projects in future.

Keywords

OER, open source, GitHub, Jekyll, static site generator

References

Anderson, T. (2013) LibGuides: Open Educational Resources (OER): Tools for Affordable Learning: Benefits and Challenges of OER [Online]. Available at https://libguides.libraries.wsu.edu/affordablelearning/oerprocon (Accessed 28 November 2019).

Diaz, C. (2018) ‘Using Static Site Generators for Scholarly Publications and Open Educational Resources’, The Code4Lib Journal, no. 42 [Online]. Available at https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/13861 (Accessed 28 November 2019).

Git community (n.d.) Git [Online]. Available at https://git-scm.com/ (Accessed 28 November 2019).

Jekyll Team (2019) Jekyll: Simple, blog-aware, static sites [Online]. Available at https://jekyllrb.com/ (Accessed 5 January 2020).

Opensource.org (2007) The Open Source Definition [Online]. Available at https://opensource.org/osd (Accessed 28 November 2019).

Williamson, E. P. (2018) ‘Make OER!’, Idaho Libraries Association Conference [Online]. Available at https://evanwill.github.io/make-oer/ (Accessed 28 November 2019).

Wolfenden, F. (2008) ‘The TESSA OER Experience: Building sustainable models of production and user implementation’, Journal of Interactive Media in Education, no. 3 [Online]. Available at http://oro.open.ac.uk/20664/ (Accessed 28 November 2019).