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Researchers are increasingly using the term openness over the past two decades to signify its impact in different areas like education, innovation, strategy, governance, etc. (Attard, Orlandi, Scerri & Auer, 2015; Janssen, Charalabidis & Zuiderwijk, 2012; Montgomery & Ren, 2018; Morgado & Teixeira, 2015; Peter & Deimann, 2013). This concept is characterized by access, democracy, transparency and participation (Schlagwein, Conboy, Feller, Leimeister & Morgan, 2017). Modern education has also been significantly impacted by openness through the availability and use of open content under open licensing (Wiley & Green, 2016). According to Hug (2017, p. 75), the term generally means “without barriers, allowing for passage; broad-minded; free; permeable.” Openness, as such, is at the core of all OEP and promotes sharing experiences and methods towards the sustainability of OEP (Dholakia, King & Baraniuk, 2006). These efforts for enabling sharable and sustainable educational practices can be traced to the evolution of Learning Objects.
Learning objects are defined generally as “educationally useful, completely self-contained chunks of content” (Wiley, 2005, p. 2). These can be classified as a “learning task, supportive information, a case study, a task class, and so forth” (van Merriënboer & Boot, 2005, p. 53). Learning objects promise to fulfill the three core criteria, i.e., “cheap, fast and good,” in developing quality educational materials inexpensively and quickly by making educational resources more reusable. Despite their importance in the “educational exchange economy,” their reuse is relatively low (Conole, 2012).
Wiley (2000, p. 6) emphasizes that the reuse of learning objects by teachers should focus for the future of Learning Objects and thus has defined them as “any digital resource that can be reused to support learning”. These developments led to the emergence of a related new field of open educational resources (OER)(Conole, 2012).OER can be seen as “a subset of Learning Objects characterised by their being educationally designed content that is free, modifiable, reusable and shareable” (McGreal, 2013, p. xviii). Wiley (2009, p. 362) also view OER as “Learning objects whose intellectual property status is clearly and intentionally labelled and licensed such that designers are free to adapt, modify and redistributed them without the need to seek permission or pay royalties.”
Both the categories, i.e., reusable learning objects and Open educational resources, overlap in the existing literature. However, the demarcation can be rooted in the differences between the two regarding open licensing provisions associated with OER that allow reuse and includes the freedom of adaption and creation of derivative works (Fulantelli, Gentile, Taibi & Allegra, 2008). Friesen (2009, p. 2) also points towards this general difference separating Learning Objects from OER in terms of the absence of “any explicit reference to openness or the open and non commercial characteristic of the resource.” Thus, the OER movement engages educators and institutions in sharing their resources and repurposing and reusing those of others without reinventing the wheel (Havemann, 2016).