AUTHOR=Otto Daniel , Kerres Michael 

TITLE=Increasing Sustainability in Open Learning: Prospects of a Distributed Learning Ecosystem for Open Educational Resources

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Education

VOLUME=Volume 7 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/education/articles/10.3389/feduc.2022.866917

DOI=10.3389/feduc.2022.866917

ISSN=2504-284X

ABSTRACT=The proliferation of Open Educational Resources (OER) constitutes an essential element for establishing education as a “public good” on the internet. Thus, several repositories and referatories for OER provision have been developed and tested in educational institutions worldwide. However, each of these platforms contains only a rather limited number of resources.  
In our article, we argue that when considered through the lens of learning innovation and sustainable development, it would be necessary to increase the discoverability of available resources at the different locations and platforms which currently are visible to only a limited number of teachers and students. To achieve this goal, the focus needs to shift from the creation and growth of new and competing platforms to intelligent ways of linking and increasing their interconnectedness. 
We use the concept of “learning ecosystems” to illustrate this approach of interconnected resources. Ecosystems go beyond the spatial dimension of learning by focusing on the diversity of actors and their interactions. Digital (networked) learning technology is part of an ecosystem and has itself to be understood as an actor. However, we discuss that ecosystems should be reflected with caution as they can themselves entail opening and closing mechanisms. Therefore, ecosystems that rely on mechanisms of opening their contents to other platforms can realize the full potential of open learning. We describe the implications of the concept of a distributed ecosystem by presenting case studies that show how technical solutions, including metadata standards and plugins, can link contents in repositories and referatories within ecosystems. The overarching objective is that the different repositories and referatories expand and improve the sustainable use of OER by merging into a distributed learning ecosystem.