and through sites such as iTunes U, Flickr and YouTube, the barriers, both technical and cultural, to sharing content have lowered considerably. We will return to this when we look at open scholarship in Chapter 7.
A Success Story?
The argument of this book is that openness has been a successful approach, and while that is relatively easy to establish for open access publishing, it is less clear with OERs. From the perspective of establishing a movement that has continued to grow over more than a decade, then OERs are a reasonable success story, compared with learning objects, say, or many other educational technology movements. However, they have not completely transformed education or disrupted it to the extent that many hoped for (Kortemeyer 2013). It has taken them over ten years and considerable investment to get to this stage, but they are now entering the global mainstream in education, and the next decade is likely to determine if their usage moves from supplementary to primary position in many forms of education. This timeframe and scale of investment is significant because it gives some indication as to the effort required to make an impact in education. The efficiency and pedagogic benefits of OERs have been apparent since the days of learning objects, but there are considerable barriers to overcome in realising these, including cultural ones such as educator reluctance to reuse other’s materials.
This indicates that the effort required to make even a modest impact in the education sector should not be underestimated. Such long-term stories with nuanced outcomes are difficult to relate to a general audience, and the media has a preference for a certain type of narrative, which we shall explore in Chapter 6.
