ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a perspective on designing open educational resources (OERs) as an activity interweaving use, design and learning. When educators decide to use OERs, one of the decisions they need to make is whether to reuse them as originally designed, or to repurpose them to fit different educational contexts. By reuse we refer to using resources again in another context but with the same content, while repurposing refers to modifying the content or learning design (Bond, Ingram, & Ryan, 2008). Depending on what educators want to do, OER can be seen either as matters of fact or matters of concern (Latour, 2005). As matters of fact, they can be seen as providing users with access to some discrete and reified content, such as, for example, video and audio lectures from faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) available in MIT OpenCourseware. However, OERs can also be seen as matters of concern, raising unexpected issues and challenges, modifying the space of interactions for learners and educators using such resources, and opening up new ways of thinking and learning. While the format and content of print textbooks are fixed beforehand, with authors trying to specify future uses of their products, many OERs can be changed and repurposed to fit existing and evolving educational activities. Viewing OERs as matters of concern implies a creative and investigative process to discover issues and work out solutions to address them, in order to meet local needs and accommodate diversity of educational practices. Inspired by the A.Telier’s (2011) Architecture and Technology for Inspirational Living research project, this creative and investigative process is seen here as a process of designing in which emphasis is placed on inquiry, rather than professional competences or a particular domain of expertise. Thus the focus will be on ‘designing rather than on the designers or design’ (emphasis in the original, A.Telier, 2011, p. 1). Taking this view of designing, educators and learners face a twofold challenge. First, they need to foster this creative and investigative process. Second, they need to find ways to turn issues raised by the use of OERs within situated educational practices into learning opportunities. This chapter provides a perspective on designing OERs which draws from design in use and learning by design. Design in use is a concept that directs attention towards users acting as designers, and objects that must evolve continuously to accommodate future unexpected needs. To introduce this concept, the experience of open source software (OSS) is presented. Learning by design is a process supporting inquiry and problem solving, and directs attention towards turning issues arising from unforeseen teaching and learning problems into opportunities for supporting an inquiry process in which dialogue and collaboration play a critical role. Consideration of design in use and learning by design provides opportunities to critically and creatively rethink designing of OERs for reuse and repurposing. It also raises dilemmas though, such as the characteristics of OSS which make it easier—compared with OERs—to repurpose them in different contexts of use; the lack of collaborative design and sharing culture in the OERs community; and motivational issues and the role of participants in the development of repurposable OERs. These are complex issues with no easy solutions. However, this chapter begins to fill the gap between designing OERs ‘at project time’—that is, when OERs are designed for the first time—and designing OERs when they are used, moving designing towards use time, and learners and educators as designers in use.
