Big and little OER

Abstract

Much of the attention around OERs has been on institutional projects which make explicit learning content available. These can be classified as ‘big OER’, but another form of OER is that of small scale, individually produced resources using web 2.0 type services, which are classified as ‘little OER’. This paper examines some of the differences between the use of these two types of OER to highlight issues in open education. These include attitudes towards reputation, the intentionality of the resource, models of sustainability, the implicit affordances of resources and the context of their hosting sites