aashi's blog

This week I examined two texts that frame the promise and the practical constraints of open educational resources (OER). David Wiley’s blog post, “The Access Compromise and the 5th R,” extends the canonical four freedoms of OER—reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute—by adding retain. His argument is straightforward: unless learners and instructors can keep their own offline copies, openness remains conditional and therefore fragile. In my experience, course-pack articles that disappear when a learning-management site is archived illustrate Wiley’s concern; retention is the prerequisite for any subsequent adaptation or sharing.

Norm Friesen’s article, “Open Educational Resources: New Possibilities for Change and Sustainability” (2009), complements Wiley by interrogating the economic foundations of openness. Friesen notes that many high-profile OER projects launch on grant funds but lack long-term revenue or governance models. He proposes community-based revision networks and limited cost-recovery mechanisms as ways to avoid obsolescence once seed funding ends. This sustainability lens resonates on my campus: while several departments have adopted open textbooks to reduce student costs, ongoing maintenance still relies on volunteer labour by sessional instructors.

Wiley’s emphasis on legal permissions and Friesen’s focus on material supports together suggest that openness is best understood as an ecosystem of rights and responsibilities. For students, robust licensing guarantees continuity of access; for institutions, sustainable workflows ensure that OER do not degrade over successive offerings. Personally, I intend to verify licences when re-using materials and to contribute minor updates—such as correcting errata or adding local examples—so that resources remain current for future cohorts. In doing so, I acknowledge that “open” is not synonymous with “cost-free” or “maintenance-free”; rather, it is a collaborative model that shifts financial and editorial responsibilities from individual students to the wider academic community.

References

Friesen, N. (2009). Open educational resources: New possibilities for change and sustainability. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 10(5). https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v10i5.664

Wiley, D. (2014, March 5). The access compromise and the 5th R. Improving Learning. https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3221

After watching Jon Dron’s keynote “How Distance Changes Everything” I found myself pausing on his claim that every separation—whether it’s miles, minutes, or mindsets—turns into a pedagogical problem the moment we step online. That idea landed hard because I recognised it from my first term of pandemic learning, when Zoom became both my classroom and my living-room wall. Dron made me realise that what felt exhausting back then wasn’t the screen time itself but the unseen gaps in pace and relationship that no one had time to bridge (Dron, 2018).

To see how those gaps shift over time, I turnedto Martin Weller’s article “Twenty Years of EdTech.” Weller walks year-by-year from the first learning-management systems through MOOCs to today’s AI tutors, showing that technology rarely fixes distance on its own; the tools that survive are the ones we bend toward community (Weller, 2018). I distilled his timeline into a quick infographic so I could keep the big picture in view while reading.

The third piece that tied everything together was Liz Marr’s history of the Open University (OU). Marr explains how OU shifted from mailing out binders to layering social annotation and data dashboards onto its courses—yet still treats conversation, not content, as the beating heart of learning (Marr, 2018). Reading her chapter suddenly reframed my own pandemic semester: the problem wasn’t Zoom; it was the absence of spaces where we could talk back to the materials and to each other.

Those three perspectives converge on one lesson for me: distance does not equal detachment. Online learning can democratise access—think of asynchronous forums that let parents study at 1 a.m. or open textbooks that slash costs—but only if we design for equity and agency. Without that care, reply fatigue sets in, bandwidth gaps widen, and our data ends up on servers far outside our control. I’ve started keeping a four-point checklist beside my lesson planner—offline-first option, time-zone-neutral deadlines, local data storage whenever possible, and multiple ways to show understanding—so I remember to humanise the space in between.

Distance learning used to feel like a compromise, a thinner version of the “real” classroom. This week’s readings flipped that script. Distance is simply the context; it becomes a deficit only when we fail to notice the humans on the far side of the screen. If we treat technology as a bridge rather than a broadcast tower, the miles shrink and the learning sticks. I’m walking away convinced that the real art of ed-tech isn’t about erasing space—it’s about filling that space with conversation, care, and choice.

References

Dron, J. (2018, May 7). How distance changes everything [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/ecSoxlYYlD0

Marr, L. (2018). The transformation of distance learning at the Open University: The need for a new pedagogy for online learning. In Higher Education in the Digital Age (pp. 13–28). Edward Elgar.

Weller, M. (2018, August). Twenty years of edtech. EDUCAUSE Review, 53(4). https://er.educause.edu/articles/2018/7/twenty-years-of-edtech