The potentially fruitful intersection of massive open online courses (MOOCs), Open Educational Resources (OERs), and libraries is nicely explored in a newly released environmental scan and assessment released under the auspices of the Association of College & Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association.
Written by Carmen Kazakoff-Lane, a librarian at Brandon University (Manitoba), the report should be useful to trainer-teacher-learners within as well as outside of libraries as we all continue exploring the ways that MOOCs, Open Educational Resources, and libraries contribute to our lifelong learning environments.
“Libraries can and should support open education….” Kazakoff-Lane suggests in the opening paragraphs of Environmental Scan and Assessment of OERs, MOOCs and Libraries: What Effectiveness and Sustainability Means for Libraries’ Impact on Open Education, “[b]ut before libraries do so, it is useful to understand the open education movement as a whole, including some of the key challenges facing both OERs and MOOCs…”—a suggestion I believe applies equally to many outside of libraries, for the more we viscerally understand MOOC and OERs through first-hand experience, the more likely we are to find creative ways to address the training-teaching-learning challenges we face.
OERs, she maintains, “are a natural outcome of several social trends” including open-content movements, “the evolution of a society where individuals actively share information and where many people collaboratively develop and improve knowledge,” Web 2.0 technology that supports the tradition of sharing ideas among colleagues, and increasingly “global access to education via the Internet.”
MOOCs, in a similar vein, are “an evolutionary outgrowth of two major trends,” she maintains: online learning and other innovations including flipped classrooms, and the Open Educational Resources movement itself.
Among her suggestions to her library colleagues are to address the need “to engage with the OER movement” and explore ways that they can support learners and learning facilitators interesting in using MOOCs as part of their learning landscape. Again, those of us who also work outside of libraries have plenty to gain through similar explorations as well as through explorations of where we might create partnerships with our library colleagues—particularly those who, by working in academic libraries, are clearly in the middle of well-established learning environments.
Our library colleagues, she notes, are in a great position to “provide important intellectual property services and advice” about copyright issues related to OERs and MOOCs; facilitate use of restricted materials; and help learners make successful transitions from being information consumers to being “a community of information sharers.”
While there is much to admire in the report, there are also points where caveat emptor is an appropriate warning. Her assertion that MOOCs “are a largely experimental undertaking that has yet to demonstrate its effectiveness as an educational tool” suggests that she has not yet had the positive experience of participating in an effective connectivist MOOC such as #etmooc (the Educational & Technology MOOC that produced tangible learning successes and produced an ongoing community of learning) or #xplrpln (the Exploring Personal Learning Networks MOOC that helped participants expand their PLNs while studying the topic).
Her presentation overall, however, is well balanced and reminds us that in spite of criticisms about low-completion rates among those registering for MOOCs, those facilitating learning through large-scale MOOCs, are “able to educate more students in one class than he or she otherwise would in an entire career.”
As she brings the report to a close, she leaves us with a recommendation well worth considering: “Libraries can and should play a central role in either [MOOCs or Open Educational Resources], and in so doing ensure that their institutions and users are best served by a sober look at the pros and cons of different models of openness for learners, educators, institutions, and governments, not just in the immediate future, but in the long term as well.”
It’s great advice for those working with and served by libraries, and it’s great advice for anyone involved in any aspect of our continually evolving concepts of lifelong learning.
Building Creative Bridges 