Week 4: Background Readings in Open Education

Readings Weeks 2 - 4:
QUESTIONS: What do these overviews of the field have in common? What do they emphasize differently? What are the aims of the authors of each report? Do you see a bias toward or against any ideas, organizations, or approaches in any of the reports? Which report spoke the most clearly to you, and why do you think it did? Based on where the field is now, and these initial ideas about where it might go, what part of the open education movement is most interesting to you? Why?

I am not sure if I can address the whole scope of this week's questions, but I will try. I should have posted my understanding here little by little, instead of trying to answer the questions all at once.
Well, it seems to me that all three reports address the OER and higher education at a certain level. I felt that the first one "Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources" was heavier in reading than the the other two. As a government forum report, it emphasized a lot the issue of return on inverstment (ROI). I was happy to read on the second report "Open Educational Practices and Resources: OLCOS Roadmap" that business models are always "tricky" when applied to education. Isn't this really the case always? This second report also seemed to be more pedagogical than the other ones, and maybe because of that I enjoyed it more. It brings nice recommendations for educators, students, policy makers, managers in the end as well as a list of selected projects and resources. To be honest, I was not aware of most of them. I always get happy when a friend shares with me the link to an open resource innitiative. And this happens usually through e-mail. I might be wrong, but I do not think that there is much general awareness about open educational resources. Much less about their importance in today's world.
The third report "A Review of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement: Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities" provides a balance of diverse innitiatives under the Hewlett foundation funding program. It is quick to provide favorable balance towards most of those innitiatives and not so much detail as to "why". In this aspect, I think that this report presents some bias. However, this report has some stronger virtues than the previous ones. It is also more aimed at resources than the other two. It is more explanatory and does tackle the issue of the necessity of promoting awareness of open content resources. It is realistic as it deals with disparities in intellectual and human capitals. One other thing that I liked was that it points out what some specific universities are doing - mainly in the developed countries, though.
It would be nice to learn in better details what is being done towards developing countries. This is the part that would be more intesting to me. But usually the reports talk briefly about this or not at all. As reported in the first reading, however, OER is a recent movement and it is difficult to refer to definite statistical data. More research is really needed in this area.