Both in Africa and internationally, a vast amount of distance education provision is closed in many respects. Consequently, although distance education is a collection of educational practices that has demonstrated great potential for increasing openness in learning, the terms should not be confused. Further, the concept of OER has great value in both distance and face—to—face educational provision, depending on how they are used.
Working within a human rights perspective, Tomasevski (2006) presents the '4—A Framework' for understanding access to education.This includes a distinction between the 'Right to Education' and 'Rights in Education' (see also Geith & Vignare, 2008; Tomasevski, 2006). The concept of rights to education is based on the availability and accessibility of educational opportunity, while rights in education include the acceptability of the educational offering in terms of language, culture and so on, together with the ability to adapt educational provision to the specific context in which it is being offered (for a detailed explanation of this approach to access see Geith & Vignare, 2008). This approach is also consistent with the open education paradigm.
The increasing focus and investment in OER has also been stimulated by a growing movement to make information and knowledge more freely accessible as a reusable resource, as a public good. The metaphor of the 'commons' has been used to understand the concept of the public good. The literature on OER makes references to a 'global education commons', 'learning commons' and so on (for example Bissell & Boyle, 2007; Hepburn, 2004; Schmidt & Surman, 2007). In 2001, Lawrence Lessig (who later launched Creative Commons—see below) published his book entitled ‘The Future of Ideas. The fate of the commons in a connected world’. The concept of the commons refers to:
Resources that are not divided into bits of property but rather are jointly held so that anyone may use them without special permission. (Liang 2004, p. 33)
A wide array of creations of nature and society that we inherit freely, share and hold in trust for future generations. (Hepburn, 2004, p. 2 citing Bollier, 2003)
Hepburn (2004) continues to note that society has always seen the value of 'that which we hold in common' as a basis for building greater value and hence, maintaining common resources is 'good for all'— or a public good. As described in Hardin's essay on the 'Tragedy of the Commons', one of the challenges with maintaining common resources, such as grazing land or road networks for example, is the tendency towards overuse and possible depletion. However, in the context of open education or software the opposite is true—information on websites and open software does not become depleted as more users make use of it. In fact, the more people make use of the resource the better it is developed as users become co—developers and provide feedback and in this way lead to improvements. In sum,
…In this inverse commons, the grass grows taller when it is grazed upon. (Hepburn, 2004, p. 6 citing Raymond, 1998)
Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) Movement
The OER movement also has some roots in the Open Source Software movement (Keats, 2003; Moore, 2002). Open source, in the context of software engineering, refers to the fact that the source code for a software programme is kept open (or made available to other users), and that the software is freely available. Anyone is free to modify the software programme as long as they freely distribute their programme with its source code (Keats, 2003). Liang (2004, p. 24) notes that the FLOSS model has been important in creating a 'counter imagination to the dominant discourse of copyright' and in this way has created an alternative approach to how the production and distribution of knowledge takes place.
Moore (2002) argues that the values of the open source software (and content) movement can be shared by higher education. She notes that HE includes the idea of learning communities fostering development and sharing of ideas through a peer review system. The same values underpin the open source software movement. For this reason, she asks:
