Big and Little OER

Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. For more information on Open Research Online's data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policies page. Biographical notes: Martin Weller is Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University. He chaired the OU's first major elearning course, which attracted over 12,000 students annually. He has been the director of VLE and the SocialLearn projects. He is the author of two books on elearning and is currently authoring one on digital scholarship. He blogs at edtechie.net Abstract Much of the attention around OERs has been on institutional projects which make explicit learning content available. These can be classified as 'big OER', but another form of OER is that of small scale, individually produced resources using web 2.0 type services, which are classified as 'little OER'. This paper examines some of the differences between the use of these two types of OER to highlight issues in open education. These include attitudes towards reputation, the intentionality of the resource, models of sustainability, the implicit affordances of resources and the context of their hosting sites.