Open Ed Resources & Problem Based Learning

Paul Duguid mentions (quoted here) that one issue with open archives is not the ideological impetus, but the rather mundane and banal issues of maintenance. Who is going to pay the bill and who is going to clean up the mess?

Seth Gurell, Yu-Chun Kuo, & Andrew Walker in The pedagogical enhancement of open education: An examination of problem-based learning in the latest issue of IRRODL portray this issue with their discussion of PBL materials in OER: while PBL materials should be a hot item for sharing since they take so much work to produce, making them an OER resource creates further complicating issues. The fact that they are open not only to instructors but also to learners means that learners can access the problem solutions as well, thus defeating the trick of what makes PBL so motivating. They acknowledge the solutions they propose as being administrative-heavy and add labour rather than save labour. Their paper illustrates by way of example that no matter what the ideological gains of OER are, the implementation is not so simple or easy.