PEERing at Education…

I just had a “doh!” moment in the context of OERs – Open Educational Resources, typically so called because they are Resources produced by an Educator under an Open content license (which to all intents and purposes is a copyright waiver). One of the things that appeals to me about OERs is that there is no reason for them not to be publicly discoverable which makes them the ideal focus for PEER – Public Engagement with Educational Resources. Which is what the OU traditionally offered through 6am TV broadcasts of not-quite-lectures…

Or how about this one?

And which the OU is now doing through iTunesU and several Youtube Channels, such as OU Learn:

(Also check out some of the other OU playlists…or OU/BBC co-pros currently on iPlayer;-)

PS It also seems to me that users tend not to get too hung up about how things are licensed, particularly educational ones, because education is about public benefit and putting constraints on education is just plain stoopid. Discovery is nine tenths of law, as it were. The important thing about having something licensed as an OER is that no-one can stop you from sharing it… (which even if you’re the creator of a resource, you may not b able to do; academics, for example, often hand over the copyright of their teaching materials to their employer, and their employer’s copyright over their research output (similarly transferred as a condition of employment) to commercial publishers who then sell the content back to their employers.