Context Is a Technical Issue
3 min read
The ability to remix and adapt openly licensed content is one of the key advantages of open educational resources - or OERs - over proprietary, traditional textbooks. However, there are still barriers to remixing that get in the way of more people making better use of this core element of open content.
For better or worse, most (all?) OERs are authored for use within a specific context. So are traditional textbooks, for that matter, but the context of a traditional textbook is the traditional school setting. There is a case to be made that the structure of traditional texts - and our familiarity and comfort with that structure - is one of the impediments to changing the structure of school as we know it. But that's a different post.
Many OERs were written to address a specific, localized need, and were published in specific systems and tools that made sense within that specific use case. These tools and contexts impose a range of structures. The more obvious structures include instructional design choices - for example, some texts embed learning outcomes at the beginning of every section. Other structures manifest in the data architecture - for example, some pieces of content require a summary alongside the main text, or treat images, video, and sound files in different ways. Another structure for web content gets added to the text itself - most OERs that have been published on a platform include css and other markup that is used to display the content in its original context, but is both meaningless and a barrier to accessibility outside that context.
This is where we run headlong into misunderstandings about what it means to "adopt" an OER. In many cases, "adopting" a text is defined as taking content that displayed in one place, and getting it to display in another. However, this approach is incomplete, and doesn't go far enough to ensure accessibility and continued reuse.
Adopting a text should mean that past assumptions - which make themselves felt in structures that surround content - are stripped from the content. When that is done, we can then reuse that content as flexibly and as quickly as possible in as many different contexts as needed. Far too often, the notion of adoption stops at the point of a single display, and that's more akin to distribution than adoption. If we limit our notions of reuse to simple distribution, we are playing the game of traditional texts, and failing to use the potential of OER to transform how we think about the roles of teachers, learners, and schools.
