From open content to open thinking

Abstract

So far Open Educational Resources (OER) research has focused on the objective to 'open' education by making accessible free educational resources to the world. In the latest years the movement has matured, and a growing amount of OER have been made available by universities, researchers and scholars through several portals. Nonetheless, the level of adoption of OERs into common teaching practices remains quite low. In this paper we suggest that one of the main barriers to OER's adoption is the lack of 'opening up' to people's thinking around OERs and we propose Cohere, a tool which aims at making this thinking visible and exportable in ways that support the emergence of 'collective intelligence' around OERs research. Accessing Collective Intelligence (CI) around OERs is presented as a medium to know and understand what people think, how people design and use OERs thus increasing the easy of re-use of OER in learning and research practices