OER – on it's way to a self-imposed digital immaturity?

Abstract

In the latest German debate on the remuneration of copyrighted material, Open Education Resources (OER) seem to be the answer to proprietary publishing offers. However, there are legal, technical and conceptual ambiguities in OER. These lead to a self-inflicted digital immaturity. This contribution is a critical examination of the OER concept from a media-pedagogical perspective. In the first part, the aforementioned ambiguities are examined in more detail. This article advocates a move towards a strong copyleft, which is currently not possible with the Creative Commons, as these may lead to proprietary materials. The technical perspective focusses on the file formats used by OER, which are often not free and/or editable. The conceptual perspective shows that OER are based on a negative concept of freedom. Also, they are under-theorized in terms of media pedagogy.
In the second part, two possible media pedagogical connections are illustrated. These are the media literacy model according to Baacke and the model of a structural media literacy according to Jörissen and Marotzki. Through these theoretical and practical approaches, the moments of media critique and reflexivity were combined with OER. This shifts the focus from an output oriented OER approach to transformative educational processes and medial articulations.