http://rusc.uoc.edu
Monograph “Open educational resources”
article
Open Educational Practices
and Resources: The olcos
Roadmap 2012
Guntram Geser
Submission date: February 2007
Published in: April 2007
Abstract
In the last few years, Open Educational Resources (OER) have gained much attention; for example, due to the
extensive media coverage on the Open Courseware initiative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the work
of ever more organisations that promote the use of Creative Commons licenses, and the success of Open Source
software-based systems such as Moodle in the educational sector. However, in order to further benefit from Open
Educational Resources it is necessary to gain a much clearer understanding of the role OER can play in changing
educational practices. Therefore, the Open e-Learning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS) project, which is
a Transversal Action under the European eLearning Programme, has produced a roadmap to provide educational
decision makers with orientation and recommendations on how to foster the further development and use of OER.
This article provides a brief overview of the context and focus of the OLCOS roadmap 2012, explains why it gives
priority to open educational practices rather than resources, and presents some drivers/enablers and inhibitors
of open educational practices and resources. Furthermore, it summarises some of the recommendations of the
roadmap report. The article also mentions and provides links to forty selected projects and resources that illustrate
the richness and diversity of the current initiatives in open educational and related resources and practices.
Keywords
open educational resources, roadmap, practices, policies, recommendations
Prácticas y recursos de educación abierta: la hoja de ruta OLCOS 2012
Resumen
En los últimos años, el movimiento Open Educational Resources u OER (recursos educativos abiertos o libres) ha atraído
mucha atención debido, por ejemplo, a la amplia cobertura de los medios de comunicación sobre la iniciativa Open Courseware
(software didáctico) del Instituto de Tecnología de Massachusetts, al trabajo de cada vez más organizaciones que promueven
el uso de licencias Creative Commons y al éxito de sistemas basados en software Open Source (código abierto) como Moodle
en el sector educativo. Sin embargo, para beneficiarse más de Open Educational Resources, es necesario entender mucho más
claramente la función que OER puede desempeñar en el cambio de prácticas educativas. Por lo tanto, el proyecto Open eLearning Content Observatory Services u OLCOS (servicios del observatorio de contenidos de aprendizaje virtual abierto),
que es una acción transversal bajo el programa de e-learning europeo, ha producido una hoja de ruta con orientaciones y
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Open Educational Practices and Resources: The OLCOS Roadmap
recomendaciones para los responsables de la toma de decisiones educativas sobre cómo fomentar todavía más el desarrollo y uso
de OER. En este artículo se proporciona una breve visión general del contexto y el enfoque de la hoja de ruta OLCOS 2012, se
explica por qué se da prioridad a prácticas educativas abiertas más que a recursos y se presentan algunos impulsores/facilitadores
e inhibidores de prácticas y recursos de educación abierta. Además, resume algunas de las recomendaciones del informe de la hoja
de ruta. El artículo también menciona y proporciona enlaces a cuarenta proyectos y recursos seleccionados que ilustran la riqueza y
diversidad de las iniciativas actuales en educación abierta y prácticas y recursos relacionados.
Palabras clave
recursos de educación abierta, hoja de ruta, prácticas, políticas, recomendaciones
1. Context and Focus of the
OLCOS Roadmap 2012
among a European community of practice in Open Educational Resources.
The project consortium comprises the European Centre for Media Competence (Germany), the European Distance and E-Learning Network (Hungary), the FernUniversitaet in Hagen (Germany), the Mediamaisteri Group
(Finland), the Open University of Catalonia (Spain) and
the project co-ordinator Salzburg Research / EduMedia
Group (Austria).
The OLCOS project considers Open Educational Resources to be an important element of policies that want to
leverage education and lifelong learning for the knowledge
society and economy. However, the project also emphasises
that for achieving this goal it is crucial to promote innovation and change in educational practices.
In particular, OLCOS warns that delivering OER to
the still dominant model of teacher-centred knowledge
transfer will have little effect on equipping teachers, students and workers with the competences, knowledge and
skills to participate successfully in the knowledge economy
and society.
Therefore, the roadmap emphasises open educational
practices that are based on a competency-focused, constructivist paradigm of learning and promote a creative and
collaborative engagement of learners with digital content,
tools and services in the learning process. However, it is
understood that a shift towards such practices will only happen in the longer term in a step-by-step process. Bringing
about this shift will require targeted and sustained efforts
by educational leaders at all levels.
Open Educational Resources (OER) are understood to
comprise content for teaching and learning, softwarebased tools and services, and licenses that allow for open
development and re-use of content, tools and services.
The importance of OER has been acknowledged by the
UNESCO, the OECD and other international and national organisations that are stakeholders in the creation
and sharing of such resources. For example, the OECD’s
Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI)
is currently carrying out an international survey on OER
(which will be completed at the beginning of 2007), and
the UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational
Planning (IIEP) facilitates a Community of Interest in
OER. This community has been active since October 2005
and has more than 600 members from 94 countries.
In this context, the Open e-Learning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS) project has produced an overview of current and likely future developments in OER,
through the presenting and assessing of drivers/enablers
and inhibitors for open educational practices and resources.
The objective has been to identify possible achievements in
a time-horizon set for 2012, and to specify how the related
challenges could be addressed. The full report will become
available for download from the project websitewww1 at the
end of January 2007. Furthermore, the project creates and
makes available a related set of information packages such
as tutorialswww2 and facilitates the exchange of knowledge
[www1] http://www.olcos.org
[www2] http://www.wikieducator.org/Open_Educational_Content
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Open Educational Practices and Resources: The OLCOS Roadmap
2. Priority of open educational
practices
as well as own competences and skills. Such contributions
may well be the most important value added Open Educational Resources.
Many promoters of Open Educational Resources (OER)
do not take into account the legacy of traditional institutional frameworks and pedagogical models. They seem to
assume implicitly that easy and free access to a “critical
mass of high-value content” (which appears as a standard
formula), and tools to make use of such content interactively, would somehow also lead to a change in such frameworks and models.
Pedagogical models are often not even considered in
the discussion of OER. The reasons for this are manifold:
for example, given UNESCO’s goal of fostering free availability of teaching and learning content and tools for developing countries, the educational paradigm must seem
of only secondary importance. Another reason is that the
discussion of OER has often been dominated by technical
and management considerations rather than the perspectives of educational practitioners. And still another reason
for a narrow understanding of OER is the focus of many
discussions on issues of appropriate licensing schemes.
OLCOS promotes the understanding that, before
addressing useful open content, tools and licenses, one
must consider the pedagogical practices in which these resources could make a difference, i.e. by being used in innovative forms of teaching and learning. This is because if the
dominant model is teacher-centred education – a teacher
mediates an authoritative textbook or course content and
learners digest and reproduce it – the Open Educational
Resources will not make for a difference in education. In
such a model, teachers may download Web-accessible open
teaching material to prepare classes, and students may use
some content to prepare material for lessons, but this will
remain a one-way channel of content provision, in which
a physical textbook or course content is replaced by digital
material.
Teachers and students will remain consumers of prefabricated content, not themselves becoming creative and
collaborative, and they will not “pay back” with own content or through adding value to content from others (e.g.
enriched material, use cases, lessons learned, etc.). Therefore, the OLCOS roadmap also promotes a change in the
professional role, self-understanding, attitudes and skills
of teachers. This would, for example, include a permanent
questioning, evaluation and improvement of educational
practices and resources, and the sharing within a community of practice of experiences, lessons learned and suggestions on how to better foster the development of students’
3. Important drivers/enablers and
inhibitors of open educational
practices and resources
The OLCOS road mapping covers the following areas: Policies, institutional frameworks and business models; Open
Access and open content repositories; and Laboratories of
open educational practices and resources. For each of these
areas, drivers/enablers and inhibitors of open educational
practices and resources are identified and described in detail. The results are summarised in Roadmap Briefs, which
may be used as starting points for discussing initiatives in
OER and open educational practices on a strategic level.
In this article, only some of the most important drivers/
enablers and inhibitors of open educational practices and
resources can be presented in brief. These are addressed
below, under the headings: educational policies, business
models, institutional frameworks, repositories of educational content and communities of practice, and new tools in
the box.
3.1. Educational policies
Despite massive investments in the e-learning infrastructure of educational institutions (hardware/software, connectivity, learning management systems, etc.) over the last
ten years or so, little impact has been achieved with regard
to changing educational practices. Therefore, educational
policy increasingly demands a stronger commitment from
directors, managers and staff of educational institutions regarding educational innovation and organisational change.
There is growing concern that the educational institutions would not support learners effectively in acquiring
the competences and skills required to participate successfully in the knowledge society and economy. This is a
pressing issue with respect to lifelong learning agendas
that want to ensure economic competitiveness and employability of workers for higher value jobs (knowledge-based
industries).
Hence, particularly in the area of ICT-based lifelong
learning, we may expect a growing understanding of the
importance of Open Educational Resources to drive participation. A point in case are the recent experiments of
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Open Educational Practices and Resources: The OLCOS Roadmap
some Open and Distance Teaching Universities to offer
open self-learning courses with the goal of “converting”
users into registered students (such projects are currently
carried out by the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities, the Open University NL and the Open
University UK). One background for this experimentation
is the global competition in Higher Education and the
foreseeable decline in student numbers in Europe due to
demographic trends.
sharing and re-use of Open Educational Resources. In
universities, greater value is often attached to research than
to teaching, in particular when it comes to academic promotion. Hence, there is usually little incentive and support
for faculty to experiment with innovative IT-enhanced
forms of teaching and to excel in producing and sharing
educational material.
In fact, experts widely agree that appropriate institutional rewards (e.g. significant relevance in academic or other
promotion) are the most important factor for successful
OER initiatives by academic and educational institutions.
Altruistic motivations or the possibility “to gain reputation”
may not be strong enough drivers to invest the required
time and effort to create OER beyond typical courseware
such as lecture notes and reading lists.
However, there are also two other important issues
in OER from an institutional perspective: Firstly, there
is often a lack of clear-cut regulations regarding IPR/copyrights; secondly, OER initiatives that aim to promote
the creation and sharing of OER among teachers will need
to invest considerable effort in training and technical support.
3.2. Business models
At present there exists a healthy level of competition among
leading institutions in providing free access to educational
resources. Many initiatives started after the extensive media coverage for M.I.T.’s Open Courseware project, which
was announced in April 2001 (for example, in the second
half of 2006 the international Open Courseware Consortium had over 100 members).
However, the larger and more widely known projects
are substantially funded and business models for sustainable OER initiatives are a major point of concern. In fact,
business models in OER are tricky and the right mix of
income streams must be found (e.g. public or/and private
funding, sponsorships, donations, fee-based services). This
will become even more difficult as there will be a growing
competition for scarce funding resources (also within institutions).
Furthermore, while currently we see much provision of
static courseware (most often in closed formats), “latecomers” to the OER movement will need to be convinced
through highly useful resources and active users who are
willing to openly share own educational material.
It is also noteworthy that educational publishers consider
the OER movement as a threat to their commercial
interests, which will make it difficult to establish innovative
private–public partnerships related to OER. Over the
coming years, there may also be a widening gap between
traditional educational content that is protected by Digital
Rights Management technology and an increasing
circulation of content that is openly shared (e.g. based on
Creative Commons licenses).
3.4. Repositories of educational content
and communities of practice
Over the last ten years or so, solid know-how has been
developed on how to make accessible, and provide for federated search of, information in distributed repositories.
This includes making use of the Open Archive Initiative
approach based on its Protocol for Metadata Harvesting,
Peer-to-Peer repositories and/or implementations by building on the Simple Query Interface (SQI) for federated
search across learning object repositories.
Yet, at present, there exists little experience in how to
effectively support communities of practice through educational repositories. Educational initiatives, particularly
larger national ones, still follow a top-down strategy that
tries to deliver a “critical mass” of learning objects to teacher-centred education. What is often not understood is
that this delivery mode reinforces the still dominant teacher-centred paradigm of education and runs counter to
the goal of innovating teaching and learning practices.
In order to see innovative educational practices emerge
and flourish, teachers and students must be enabled to become creative and share resources that they find useful in
certain learning contexts. Hence, educational repositories
will need to think more carefully about how to be useful
3.3. Institutional frameworks
The established culture of academic and higher education institutions does not particularly foster the creation,
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Open Educational Practices and Resources: The OLCOS Roadmap
for communities of practice, which is of critical importance
if OER initiatives want to grow based on user contributions and sharing of content among users.
Usually a provider model that sets out to do something
for communities of practice – most often to provide access
to a database of content, will not work out. Rather, such
communities must be enabled to do and achieve something
themselves. In fact, the notion of a community of practice
implies that members of such a community share an interest in promoting particular practices and want to further
develop know-how both in addressing certain problems,
and in resources such as educational content. In order to
support communities of practice, educational repositories
will need to implement available “new tools in the box”.
organisations, business information services or sections of
international news services.
For educational repositories it will also be essential
to connect teachers and students more effectively to
the body of codified knowledge in certain domains, e.g.
thesauri, classification systems, domain ontologies. It
is expected that over the next five to ten years Semantic
Web applications will provide novel ways of making use of
such knowledge resources. For example, there are already
interesting examples of concepts-based access, semantic
filter & browser applications, and Social Software tools
such as semantic Wikis.
4. Recommendations
for stakeholders
3.5. New tools in the box
The OLCOS roadmap report provides a comprehensive
set of recommendations for stakeholders, from educational
policy makers and funding bodies to individual teachers
and students. Among the suggested actions are the following:
Educational policy makers and funding bodies should
demand that academic and educational resources that have
been fully or to a larger part publicly funded are made freely accessible under an appropriate license (e.g. Creative
Commons or similar). For example, licenses for educational content ideally should be free from restrictions to
modify, combine and repurpose the content.
With respect to educational open access repositories,
funding bodies should concentrate on fostering the development of widely used, technologically state-of-the-art and
sustainable repositories. Project selection criteria should
demand that proposers show an in-depth understanding
of how an as broad as possible active usage of the repository can be established. Funding schemes should provide
for a longer-term perspective, through initial funding for
achieving full operation, and further funding based on a
critical assessment of actual usage.
Boards, directors and supervisors of educational institutions are advised to scrutinize whether educational institutions employ innovative approaches beyond classical teacher-centred knowledge transfer. For example, they should
ask educational institutions about what amount of teachers’
work concentrates on coaching students in identifying real
world problems, clarifying study approaches, assessing the
relevance of information and observations, and critically
discussing study results.
The last few years have seen a tremendous increase in the
use of Social Software tools and services such as Weblogs,
Wikis, social networking, content and bookmarks sharing,
etc. beyond the educational sector. As this new generation
of Web-based tools and services empowers learners to easily create and share content even the smallest “spill-over”
could have a considerable impact in terms of changes in
educational practices. However, at present, the use of Social Software by individual teachers and educational organisations is at an experimental stage.
Currently, the Web environment is changing dramatically and digital content has become highly fluid. It can
be more easily produced, syndicated, assembled, and wrapped in different ways. In addition, services that deliver
some type of information can be combined to provide
astonishing new ways of integrating content (so called
“mashups”).
One important basis of the explosion of services is the
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) Web feed mechanism
which has become a standard for content distribution and
syndication. This can be used by educational content access
providers for bringing fresh, continuously updated information onto their portals. Of particular interest will be to
allow individual learners and study groups to select feeds
on certain subjects that provide them with thematically relevant content including podcasts (audio) and videocasts.
However, RSS feeds do not necessarily have to have an
educational label. Rather, students who are focusing on a
particular research question will often gain from subscribing to feeds from non-governmental agencies, scientific
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With respect to sharing and reusing of open resources from a common pool of content, tools and services,
the roadmap suggests establishing formal co-operations
between educational organisations. Among the positive
effects, not only are cost reductions in the development and
management of resources considered, but also a leveraging
of their quality. For example, the fact that any resources
that are made available will be assessed critically by partner
institutions will also impact favourably on internal quality
criteria and control.
Reward mechanisms and supportive measures are considered as being vital in initiatives for open educational
resources in order to drive the development and sharing of
resources at an institutional level. Boards, directors and supervisors will need to question established values, traditions and practices: for example, the greater value that is often
attached to research as compared to teaching, particularly
when it comes to academic promotion.
The roadmap also stresses that in many institutions
it is far from clear who owns IPR/copyrights and what
licenses should be employed when making resources available to others. A recommendation here is that contracts of
employed researchers and educators should acknowledge
the IPR of authors, but require non-exclusive copyrights
for the institution to make educational resources accessible under appropriate licenses. In addition, mechanisms
should be implemented that (semi-)automatically attach
licenses to material that is made available.
With respect to the set of recommendations for learners, it may be interesting that the roadmap invites students to challenge teachers with requests such as: Why not
use Weblogs to share ideas, observations and commented
links to useful study material? Why not use a Wiki for a
collaborative study project? Why not subscribe to thematic
RSS-feeds that provide a project with relevant and regularly
updated “real world” information? A further recommendation for students is to have an e-portfolio for documenting
and reflecting the progress and results of their study work,
and to make results they are proud of accessible through an
open access repository under an open content license.
Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (COSL) /
OpenEd conferences
<http://cosl.usu.edu>
Commonwealth of Learning – Learning Object Repository
<http://www.col.org/colweb/site/pid/2922>
Connexions (online platform for managing and sharing open course modules)
<http://cnx.org>
Creative Commons
<http://creativecommons.org>
Development Gateway – Open Educational Resources (aims at putting the Internet to work for developing
countries)
<http://topics.developmentgateway.org/
openeducation>
Directory of Open Access Journals
<http://www.doaj.org>
Edublogs Awards
<http://www.incsub.org/awards>
EducaNext (open content brokerage service for Higher
Education)
<http://www.educanext.org>
Education Podcast Network
<http://epnweb.org>
Elgg.net (educational community software initiative)
<http://elgg.net>
Freesound (a growing database of sounds that are licensed
under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License)
<http://freesound.iua.upf.edu>
GLEF Learning Interchange & Edutopia (George Lucas
Educational Foundation)
<http://ali.apple.com/ali_sites/glefli>
Global SchoolNet Foundation (promotes international
cooperation in problem/project-based learning)
<http://www.globalschoolnet.org>
GlobalText project (aims to create a free library of 1,000
electronic textbooks for students in the developing
world)
<http://globaltext.org>
GLOBE – Global Learning Objects Brokered Exchange
(a collaboration of Ariadne, Education.au, eduSource
Canada, MERLOT and NIME)
<http://globe.edna.edu.au/globe/go>
INDICARE (Informed Dialogue about Consumer
Acceptability of Digital Rights Management Solutions
in Europe) project
<http://www.indicare.org>
iRights.info (an information resource on IPR and
copyright; information in German)
<http://irights.info>
5. Selected projects and resources
The following forty projects and resources have been selected
to illustrate the richness and diversity of the current initiatives in open educational and related resources and practices:
AVOIR – African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources
<http://avoir.uwc.ac.za>
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Lernmodule.net (open content repository for the school
sector in Germany)
<http://lernmodule.net>
LibriVox (promotes free, public-domain audio books)
<http://librivox.org>
M.I.T. Open Courseware (OCW)
<http://ocw.mit.edu>
MathWorld (an extensive free mathematics resource)
<http://mathworld.wolfram.com>
OECD – Centre for Educational Research and Innovation
(CERI): Open Educational Resources project/survey
<http://www.oecd.org/document/20/0,2340,en_2649_
35845581_35023444_1_1_1_1,00.html>
Open Education Association (promotes the idea of OER
among university and college professors)
<http://www.openeducationassociation.org>
Open Educator (focuses on knowledge sharing, tools and
resources on OSS)
<http://www.openeducator.org>
Open Knowledge Network (promotes collection and
sharing of local knowledge by using flexible technical
solutions; operates in Africa, South Asia and Latin
America)
<http://www.openknowledge.net>
OpenCourse.org (“Open Content + Community = Open
Course”)
<http://www.OpenCourse.org>
OpenDOAR – Directory of Open Access Repositories
<http://www.opendoar.org>
OpenLearn – Open University UK
<http://openlearn.open.ac.uk>
Project Gutenberg
<http://www.gutenberg.org>
Public Knowledge Project (develops free, open source
software for the management, publishing and indexing
of journals and conferences)
<http://www.pkp.ubc.ca>
Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking International
Consortium (supported by the Soros Foundations
Network)
<http://ct-net.net>
Schoolforge (wants schools to enjoy the benefits of Free
and Open Source Software)
<http://www.schoolforge.net>
Science Commons (aims at removing barriers to the flow
of scientific knowledge and technical information)
<http://sciencecommons.org>
Survey of Open Content Projects in Non-Western
Countries
<http://oc.openflows.org
Textbook Revolution (a searchable database of free
textbooks)
<http://textbookrevolution.org>
UNESCO – IIEP Community of Interest in Open
Educational Resources / OER useful resources
<http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org>
UNESCO Free & Open Source Software Portal
<http://www.unesco.org/cgi-bin/webworld/portal_
freesoftware/cgi/page.cgi?d=1>
Wikibooks (a collection of open content, Wiki-based
textbooks)
<http://en.wikibooks.org>
WikiEducator (a Commonwealth of Learning initiative to
develop free educational resources online)
<http://www.wikieducator.org>
World Bank – Youthink!
<http://youthink.worldbank.org>
Bibliography
This is a selection of some generally relevant publications from the roadmap bibliography which lists over 250
publications:
albright, paul (2005). “Final forum report”. In: Internet
Discussion Forum: Open Educational Resources. Open
Content for Higher Education (24 October – 2 December 2005). [Online report]. UNESCO – International
Institute for Educational Planning. [Date of consultation: December 12, 2006].
<http://www.ifap.ru/library/book064.pdf >
alexander, bryan (2006). “Web 2.0. A new wave of innovation for teaching and learning?” [online article].
Educause Review. March/April 2006. [Date of consultation: December 12, 2006].
<http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0621.
pdf>
bateman, peter; tucker, kim (2006). “Report of the
discussions on developing a research agenda for Open
Educational Resources”. In: International Community
of Interest. Open Educational Resources. Open Content for
Higher Education. [Online report]. UNESCO – International Institute for Educational Planning. [Date of
consultation: December 12, 2006].
<http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org/images/f/fa/OER_
research_agenda_report.pdf>
bechler, rosemary (2006). Unbounded Freedom. A guide
to Creative Commons thinking for cultural organisations
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Open Educational Practices and Resources: The OLCOS Roadmap
[online book]. London: Counterpoint. [Date of consultation: December 12, 2006].
< h t t p : / / w w w. c o u n t e r p o i n t - o n l i n e . o r g /
download/325/Unbounded-freedom.pdf>
daniel, john; west, paul; mackintosh, wayne (2006).
“Exploring the role of ICTs in addressing educational
needs: identifying the myths and the miracles”. In: NADEOSA 10th Anniversary Conference. Pretoria, South
Africa [online article].
<http://www.col.org/colweb/site/pid/4042>
downes, stephen (2006). Models for Sustainable Open
Educational Resources. In: OECD expert meeting on
Open Educational Resources (6-7 February 2006: Malmö, Sweden). [Date of consultation: December 12,
2006].
<http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/3/5/36781698.pdf>
european commission. directorate-general for
education and culture (2004, November). “Key
Competences for Lifelong Learning: a European Reference Framework”. In: Implementation of the “Education
and Training” 2010 Work Programme. Working Group B
“Key Competences”. [Date of consultation: December 12,
2006].
<http://europa.eu.int/comm/education/policies/
2010/doc/basicframe.pdf>
holmes, brian (2005). “E-learning content – a European
policy perspective”. In: Open Culture: Accessing and Sharing Knowledge Workshop (27-29 June 2005: University
of Milan). [Date of consultation: December 12, 2006].
<http://www.aepic.it/conf/viewpaper.php?id=106&cf=3>
hylén, jan (2006). “Open Educational Resources: Opportunities and Challenges”. In: Open Education 2006:
Community, Culture, and Content (27-29 September
2006: Utah State University, Logan, UT). [Final proceedings online] [Date of consultation: December 12,
2006].
<http://cosl.usu.edu/conferences/opened2006/
proceedings>
oecd – Centre for Educational Research and Innovation
(2006). “Notes from Expert Meeting on Open Educational Resources”. (6-7 February 2006: Malmö, Sweden). [Date of consultation: December 12, 2006].
<http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/12/46/36162143.pdf>
owen, m.; grant, l., sayers, s., facer, k. (2006). Opening
Education: Social software and learning [online report].
Bristol: Futurelab. [Date of consultation: December 12,
2006].
<http://www.futurelab.org.uk/download/pdfs/
research/opening_education/Social_Software_report.
pdf>
wiley, david (2006, September). “On the Sustainability
of Open Educational Resource Initiatives in Higher
Education” [online article]. Utah State University:
Center for Open and Sustainable Learning. [Date of
consultation: December 12, 2006].
<http://opencontent.org/docs/oecd-report-wileyfall-2006.pdf>
willinsky, john (2006). The Access Principle: The Case for
Open Access to Research and Scholarship [online book].
Cambridge and London: MIT Press. [Date of consultation: December 12, 2006].
<https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/willinsky/
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Recommended reference
geser, guntram (2007). “Open Educational Practices and Resources: The OLCOS Roadmap 2012”. In: “Open
educational resources” [on-line monograph]. Revista de Universidad y Sociedad del Conocimiento (RUSC). Vol. 4, no. 1.
UOC. [Date of consultation: dd/mm/yy].
<http://www.uoc.edu/rusc/4/1/dt/eng/geser.pdf>
issn 1698-580X
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Open Educational Practices and Resources: The OLCOS Roadmap
About the author
Guntram Geser
Head of Information Society Research, Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft m.b.H.
[email protected]
Guntram Geser leads the Department of Information Society Research of Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft
m.b.H., Austria. He has in-depth experience in EU-funded projects (IST priority and other programmes) and
national projects as carried out in industrial competency centres. Main tasks in such projects are the development
of ICT research & development roadmaps, technology monitoring & assessment, and studies on ICT adoption,
usage, and impact. Exemplary projects are EPOCH - Excellence in Processing Open Heritage (FP6-IST Network
of Excellence, 2004-2008), http://www.epoch-net.org; DigiCULT Forum (FP5-IST accompanying measure, 20022004), http://www.digicult.info; EP 2010 - The Future of Electronic Publishing in 2010 (Strategic study for the
European Commission, DG Information Society, Directorate E, 2002/2003), http://ep2010.salzburgresearch.at.
Guntram Geser holds a Doctorate (Communication and Political Sciences) from the Paris Lodron University,
Salzburg, and a Master of Advanced Studies in Telematics Management from the Donau-University Krems, Austria.
Before joining Salzburg Research he concentrated on cultural studies of technology and media in projects carried
out in Berlin (Technical University Berlin, Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie) and Amsterdam (Instituut
for Film- en Televisiewetenschap, Nederlands Filmmuseum). He also lectured at the Vienna Interdisciplinary
Research Unit for the Study of (Techno-)Science and Society and worked as media consultant for the Austrian
Cultural Service.
rusc vol. 4 n.º 1 (2007) | issn 1698-580x
Guntram Geser