4 A Critical Take on OER Practices: Interrogating Commercialization, Colonialism
4 A Critical Take on OER Practices: Interrogating Commercialization, Colonialism, and Content
Sarah Hare
Photo by Flickr user arbyreed (CC BY NC 2.0)
Introduction
This spring, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) held their 2015 biennial conference in Portland. While I attended multiple sessions and poster presentations on Open Access (OA) and Open Educational Resources (OER), Heather Joseph’s invited paper session, “Open Expansion: Connecting the Open Access, Open Data and OER Dots,” left the most lasting impression on me. Joseph’s presentation focused on the different embodiments of openness and how collaboration between the efforts could be transformative. While explaining the Open Data front, Joseph’s presentation stopped on a photo of an oil rig. A few slides later, she summarized politicians’ take on open data, explaining that while President Obama had called data a “valuable national commodity,” Dutch politician Neelie Kroes had gone a step further and named data “the new oil for the digital age” (Joseph, 2015; Kroes, 2012). Joseph (2015) went on to explain that Kroes’ assertion was that “national economies and national destinies [were] going to rise and fall on understanding how to get the most value from data.”
Right before I listened to Kroes’ words, which seemed so profoundly nationalistic and exploitative to me in that moment, I saw the photo of the rig and thought about western conquest and our pursuit of other nations’ natural resources. This sparked a deep realization within me. I found that all of the discussions I had engaged in about openness—including Joseph’s presentation—were about shared goals or shared politics. The shared risks were often left unaddressed. I started to consider how openness, when disconnected from its political underpinnings, could become as exploitative as the traditional system it had replaced. I began to reflect on the ways in which I had used, or experienced others’ use of, openness as a solution for poverty or development—often in a way that was disconnected from an understanding of systemic inequality.
This article, which is an intentional critique of OER praxis, has given me the space to explore these questions. OER are digital learning objects that are shared under “an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.” Under this definition, learning objects can mean almost anything used as educational material, including tutorials, videos, guides, lesson plans, and syllabi. The Open Education movement is different than the OA movement, which is focused on the free and unrestricted use of research materials and literature. However, like Open Education, OA works to enable deeper unrestricted analysis so that scholars can read articles but also “crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose” (Chan, et. al, 2015, para 3).
This article uses a critique of OER creation and practice as a proxy for th