OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES AND USER GENERATED CONTENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION - NEW CONCEPTS, OLD PROBLEMS?

“User-generated content” (UGC) and “Open educational resources” (OER) are two success stories whose popularity - and thus extension - has exploded in the last years, especially following the rise of web 2.0 applications/technology. UGC refers to various kinds of media content, publicly available, that are produced by end-users; OER are learning materials that are freely available for use, remixing and redistribution.

Although the two concepts are far from being identical, they share a common spirit in the following aspects:
a) both include the idea of peer-production or shared production of the output (exceptions are possible);
b) both question the traditional role of “authority”: in UGC, the users produce the content; in OER, the resource can be re-written, re-ordered, re-....
c) both accept a production process outside of formal quality assurance mechanisms.

These aspects seem to be totally contradictory to the experiences many students (and teachers) associate with traditional higher education institutions. Nevertheless, two European projects (CONCEDE and OPAL) explore exactly this contradiction - how the use of two open, participative and innovative concepts can happen and succeed in an environment that in many European countries has just passed through a substantial reform process which many perceived as a shift towards more rigidity and ex-cathedra teaching; - how both concepts offer chances to avoid this shift; - how the concern of missing quality can be smoothed out by using mainstream and alternative quality assurance mechanisms.

The speech will outline the topics and present results from an online survey concerning user-generated content. A first draft of a quality framework will be presented and discussed.