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Proceedings of the STS Conference Graz 2021
Johannes HIEBL
DOI: 10.3217/978-3-85125-855-4-07
132
Normative Objects in Educational Infrastructures
1
J. Hiebl
DIPF | Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education
Abstract. This paper describes open learning and teaching materials, so-called open
educational resources (OER), as visualizing, economic and normative objects, and
classifies these into a plenum with interwoven practices and arrangements of material
(Schatzki). The plenum determines how the actors, their socio-material practices, and
the associated political and technical frameworks each generate different
interpretations of OER for the actors. The discussion is based on a case study of a
video platform providing academic content. The empirical example, studied via
document analysis and content analysis, of the TIB AV portal as an educational
infrastructure offering videos of scientific conferences and teaching as an online
service shows how the normative requirements to open educational resources are
produced by the infrastructure. The paper focuses on the argument that the normative
dimension of OER be part of material arrangements. The normative OER model is
implemented in the infrastructure, while the social norms of openness are provided by
the service. OER in terms of normative objects embodying the norm of openness are
produced performatively through repositories.
1 Introduction
This paper shows how learning and teaching materials can be framed as different
objects of knowledge: as visualizing objects, as economic objects and as normative
objects. Open learning and teaching materials were first labelled “open educational
resources” (OER) in 2002 by UNESCO and a global movement (community) has since
developed around this concept. An early initiative in 2001 is MIT OpenCourseWare.
2
An online open publishing platform for educational materials from MIT (Massachusetts
Institute of Technology) courses. For 20 years the non-governmental organization
Creative Commons (CC) has designed license models to enable the practice of sharing
knowledge.
3
In 2007 the Cape Town Open Education Declaration issued a principle,
strategy and commitment to spark dialogue, inspire action and help the open education
movement grow.
4
The normative aspect is thus acknowledged. Nevertheless, OER is
a minor phenomenon in higher education. Research in the activist field of the open
movement has a mostly technical focus on implementing infrastructure. This
1
I want to express my sincere thanks to all reviewers of the paper for elaborated and helpful feedback,
and the conference organizers and participants for fruitful comments within the session.
2
https://ocw.mit.edu/
3
https://creativecommons.org/
4
https://www.capetowndeclaration.org/
Proceedings of the STS Conference Graz 2021
Johannes HIEBL
DOI: 10.3217/978-3-85125-855-4-07
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contribution wants to move the focus to the socio-material arrangements of
infrastructure. Seeing OER as normative objects: does the digitalisation of learning and
teaching materials based on OER principles influence the concerns of teaching and
learning in terms of content, location or method? This question creates a discursive
framework for deciphering the digital nature of the mediality and performativity of digital
educational infrastructures provided by these learning and teaching materials and asks
what they achieve in their digital materiality, and how they pre-configure the interaction
order of the participants and their practices. The normative model that is inscribed in
this form of digital learning objects is explicated in the definition of open educational
resources.
5
The example of the AV portal of the German National Library of Science
and Technology (TIB) shows how this model is reproduced performatively in digital
educational infrastructures. The TIB AV portal is an online service providing academic
videos with a focus on technology, mathematics and natural science, including lecture
and conference recordings as well as (open) audio-visual learning and teaching
materials.
Below, the open educational resources will be followed as actors, in line with Bruno
Latour’s “follow the actors” (2005, p. 12). First, OERs will be described using the
UNESCO definition and framed as normative objects. This will be framed by drawing
on Theodore Schatzki’s practice ontology of the plenum of practices and material
arrangements (2016). A crucial contribution of ontologies to empirical analysis is their
provision of concepts and ways of thinking that help conceptualize topics and objects
and formulate descriptions, explanations, and interpretations (Schatzki, 2016, p. 40).
Therefore, socio-material, praxeological investigations to take the plenum of practices
and material arrangements seriously and develop concepts that can grasp its nature
and processes (Schatzki, 2016, p. 40). The concept of practice also enables questions
concerning the reproduction and transformation of cultural orders which offer actors a
meaningful scope for action (Schäfer, 2016, p. 10). Based on the materiality of
practice, the interactional orders in the production of OER can be shown in the use of
objects and symbols.
2 Open Educational Resources as a Concept and an Object
Open educational resources can refer to texts, images, graphics, course plans, slide
sets, audio and/or video recordings, scripts, textbooks, etc. The term “open” implies
that this educational material should be freely accessible. Since OER are primarily a
5
As can be seen in Downes (2001), the term “learning objects” focuses on the technical conveyance of
learning and teaching materials. In its technology-conveyed capacity as “resources for distance
education worldwide”, it precedes the term open educational resources in a certain way.
Proceedings of the STS Conference Graz 2021
Johannes HIEBL
DOI: 10.3217/978-3-85125-855-4-07
134
digital phenomenon, this means that the material should be: (1) available online without
such barriers as paywalls or membership; (2) in file formats that do not require the use
of software fenced off with paywalls or membership; and (3) available under an open
or free licence (such as the Creative Commons licensing models) where the author
universally releases extensive usage rights, for example the right to reproduce,
redistribute and/or edit the material. So, they have the practice as their goal and law
as their means. In their materiality and mediality, open educational resources are
everyday learning and teaching materials available in various media (speech and
image representations) and materialities (sounds reproduced through speakers, light
shed through projections, paper and ink, blackboard and chalk).
In the open educational resources movement
6
(Knox, 2013) which is shaping the
OER discourse, the UNESCO definition is usually (2019)
7
used to describe OER: “open
educational resources are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium –
digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an
open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others
with no or limited restrictions.” This definition incorporates two specific sets of
standards: First, social norms of open and public access, i.e., the first and second
implications of the term “open” described above. Second, legal norms: copyright
applies to all educational materials as works for the protection of intellectual property,
but the free licences contained in OER represent a universal usage contract in terms
of copyright law. The use of free licences requires identifying the materials as OER via
a symbol, which nevertheless does not constitute an OER label per se.
In addition to these sets of norms inscribed in the definition and the term itself, the
OER model contains two normative promises that UNESCO formulates on its website
(2019): “UNESCO believes that universal access to information through high quality
education contributes to peace, sustainable social and economic development, and
intercultural dialogue. OER provide a strategic opportunity to improve the quality of
learning and knowledge sharing as well as improve policy dialogue, knowledge-sharing
and capacity-building globally.” The normative promises contained in OER as learning
and teaching materials framed in terms of educational policy are: First, the promise of
equal opportunities and fairness in education. Open educational resources are
intended to open up education to everyone. Second, to increase the quality of
education; education should convey current and true knowledge. Open educational
resources make a promise to “decentralize, democratise and emancipate” education
with “digital technology utopianism” (Dickel and Schrape, 2015). These inscriptions
6
The field of the open educational resources movement is interwoven with other movements such as
open source, open access, open data, open content and open science.
7
In the field of the open educational resources movement, OERs are defined at various points by
different activist institutions and people, which in essence do not differ or differ only slightly in wording.
Proceedings of the STS Conference Graz 2021
Johannes HIEBL
DOI: 10.3217/978-3-85125-855-4-07
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and promises express the politically framed model of OER, to which I will return in the
application of the plenum of practices and material arrangement of open educational
resources.
OER as visualizing objects: I use the term “visualizing objects”, to grasp the basic
function of learning and teaching materials. Visualizing objects enable knowledge to
be conveyed by showing them with the help of their material and medial properties.
Rheinberger (2010) shows how different modes of visualization convey scientific
knowledge (“epistemic imaging strategies”). This can take different forms: (1) the
interweaving of instrumental technologies, scientific objects and corresponding forms
of visualization, (2) their presentation in exhibitions and lectures, or (3) descriptions in
academic texts. Visualizing objects can medially represent epistemic objects (Knorr
Cetina, 2001) and didactic objects (Kalthoff et al., 2020).
8
OER as economic objects: if one considers copyright and the property rights
associated with it, OER should be considered with regard to their value as intellectual
property and, if applicable, any devaluing. In the open educational resources
movement, it is assumed that OERs are created by teachers (and learners) in the
course of their everyday teaching/learning practice.
9
According to Marx (2013, pp. 49–
61), the teachers’ everyday work products become commodities for which socially
necessary working hours were expended. By publishing OER under a free licence,
teachers (and learners) as content deliverers exercise the property rights in unusual
ways by granting everyone far-reaching non-exclusive usage rights free of charge, to
the resources and thus to their work product. In line with the OER concept, this waiver
is free of charge. In this way, OERs, as Marx might put it, lose their exchange value as
a commodity, which no longer corresponds to their real value relationship.
10
This
economic perspective is interwoven with the normative perspective.
OER as normative objects: teaching and learning materials become promising
through the normative promises of OER. Turner (2010, p. 16) notes that normative
objects contain tacit rules hiding behind other rules. Nonetheless, these rules are
necessary. But in contrast to Turner’s understanding of normative objects where their
tacit rules make them necessary and able to do things that explicit objects cannot do,
8
All epistemic objects and didactic objects can also be visualising objects. However, not all visualising
objects are epistemic objects and didactic objects.
9
It is inherent in the idea of OER that these new resources are in turn created from existing OER. The
users should, to a certain extent, find themselves in a role of prosumers, as producers and consumers
in one. The lecturers, as content deliverers, have to deal with the infrastructure and thus in the second
level with the models implemented by technicians and engineers.
10
A common argument for this is that the positions of people who teach at universities and who produce
the material are already publicly funded. Hess and Ostrom (2007)) plead for “understanding knowledge
as a commons.” For example, the Cape Town Declaration ((2008)) demands: “Making publicly funded
educational resources open to the public by default is not only a just and fair practice, it also unlocks
benefits for society.”
Proceedings of the STS Conference Graz 2021
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DOI: 10.3217/978-3-85125-855-4-07
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the normative rules of OER are not hidden, but are a prerequisite for their creation and
labelling. However, they take a back seat to the primary functions of OER as visualising
objects. At the same time, visualising objects only become open educational resources
through normative framing and labelling through open licences. On the other hand, the
normative framework of OER directly influences their meaning and value as economic
objects.
3 Plenum of Open Educational Resources
Schatzki (2016, pp. 28–29) identifies three lexical commonalities in practice theory: (1)
“the term 'practices' is central to their theories and analyses of social phenomena”, (2)
“practices [understood] as social in character, at least in the sense of being something
carried out by indefinitely many people”, and (3) “social phenomena such as
organizations, power, science, education, and transportation are understood as
constellations of, aspects of, or rooted in practices.” Practices are collections of actions
and sets of rules and resources (Giddens, 1979; Schatzki, 2016, p. 29). In “institutional
sectors such as economy, polity, law, and discourse are distinguished by which of the
three structural types of rules and resources (signification, domination, legitimation) a
given sector organizes” (Schatzki, 2016, p. 29).
Bearing that in mind Schatzki (2016, p. 31) defines practice ontologies as flat
ontologies, “because (1) they treat practices as the central element in the constitution
of social phenomena; and (2) practices are laid out on one level.” Schatzki rejects
ontologies that distinguish between two separate levels of the social, i.e., a “micro” as
the locus of social interactions and “macro” as the locus of social structures. Practices
are to be understood as open, “spatially-temporally dispersed sets of doings and
sayings organized by common understandings, teleo-affectivities (ends, tasks,
emotions), and rules” (Schatzki, 1996, 2016, p. 32). Material arrangements are “linked
bodies, organisms, artifacts, and things of nature” (Schatzki, 2016, p. 32). “Practices
and arrangements form bundles in that (1) practices affect, alter, use, and are directed
toward or are inseparable from arrangements; while (2) arrangements channel,
prefigure, and facilitate practices” (Schatzki, 2016, p. 32). The “site of the social” lies
in these bundles (Schatzki, 2002). There are six types of relations between practices
and arrangements: causation, use, constitution, intentionality, constraint and
prefiguration (Schatzki, 2016, p. 32).
According to Schatzki (2016, pp. 32–33), “The objective spatial-temporal spread of
the plenum of practices and arrangements defines the boundaries of the possible
objective spatial-temporal extensions and shapes of social phenomena”, which means
that no priority can be given to the local situation. This is in contrast to Erving Goffman
(1983) ethnomethodological and phenomenological approaches, which always
Proceedings of the STS Conference Graz 2021
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DOI: 10.3217/978-3-85125-855-4-07
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emphasize local situations. As Schatzki writes, “The activities, entities, rules,
understandings, and teleologies that are at work in any interaction or local situation are
elements of phenomena - practices, arrangements, and bundles thereof - that stretch
over time and space beyond such situations. Indeed, these items often come to be at
work in interactions and local situations because they are components of practice-
arrangement bundles” (Schatzki, 2016, pp. 32–33). Therefore the social does not exist
separately above this plenum and macro and micro are not definable levels of the
social (Schatzki, 2016, pp. 32–33). Schatzki rejects the perspective of Geels and Schot
(2007, p. 406), who view the macro level as stabilised, material infrastructures which,
as “gradients of force”, make it easier or more difficult for people to perform certain
actions within them. Schatzki (2016, p. 38) says it would be “a mistake to shear off the
material dimension of society and to reify it as a relatively hard form that shapes social
life”. The social consists of bundles of practices and material arrangements, the
material dimension of which is considerably malleable. Arrangements continually
evolve with and as part of changes in bundles. The material dimension also affects
activities in a variety of ways. Only nature can be treated as relatively immobile.
Schatzki (2010) describes the bundles of practices and material arrangements in an
essay relating to horse breeding in the bluegrass region of Kentucky. It shows how the
material participates in the social. The interweaving of practices and arrangements in
horse training is connected and intertwined with those of horse breeding, horse trade,
stud farms, and equestrian sport itself. The interrelationship between the material and
natural entities is described as follows: “The pond makes it easy to let thirsty horses
get a drink, hard to lead horses directly to the barn from the paddocks (i.e., through the
pond’s middle), and invigorating to gallop one’s mount through its shallow end”
(Schatzki, 2010, p. 140). Based on the history of the region, he develops the
transformations of these webs (Schatzki, 2010, pp. 141–144) from the arrival of
European settlers and their farming practices to the acquisition of food, the spatial-
temporal cultivation of plants and the landscape, the equipment used, and the work
practices used. Up to the region’s transformation into a tourism region known for its
horse breeding and the associated material facilities of horse farms and riding and
sightseeing practices.
Theodore Schatzki (2016) suggests a plenum of practices and material arrangement
as a practice ontology. Ontology is the science of being, it centers on the categorization
of the being and the fundamental structures of reality. It intends to create a
classification system of basic types of entities (concrete and abstract objects,
properties, issues, events, processes) and their structural relations. Thus, practice
theory is always ontology. However, what are the entities and structural relations of the
social? Figure 1 shows the plenum of practices and material arrangements grouped
around the phenomenon of open educational resources. Hilmar Schäfer (2016, pp. 10–
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DOI: 10.3217/978-3-85125-855-4-07
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11) describes, following Andreas Reckwitz (2006), how practice theory, as the
integration of interpretative and structuralist cultural theories, leaves two questions
unanswered: (1) What options do participants within cultural orders have? (2) How do
cultural orders, their reproduction and transformation develop? This gives rise to three
analytical dimensions of socio-material practices that I would like to add to the plenum
of practices and material arrangements: action capabilities, transformation and
reproduction.
Fig. 1. Plenum of open educational resources
In order to turn learning and teaching materials into OER, various production
practices are necessary. The individual practices, the creation of texts and graphics,
the production of image and sound material, the search, combination, licensing,
keywording, labelling and provision of educational resources, but also information
about the practices and the OER model should be understood relationally and cannot
be viewed in isolation; they have to be explicated in relation to the practices that
preceded them, their social context and their material endowment (see also Schäfer,
2016, p. 11). Most of these practices are associated with computers and the respective
input and output devices: screens, touchscreens, keyboards, mice. But there are also
practices that are not (directly) connected with computers. In addition to digital pixels,
ink and paper can also be used in the creation of texts and graphics, for example, for
initial drafts and brainstorming. Image and sound materials are mostly recorded with
digital cameras and audio recorders, but the practice of speaking (for example in a
lecture) and the captured images (either as part of the lecture or to visualize epistemic
Proceedings of the STS Conference Graz 2021
Johannes HIEBL
DOI: 10.3217/978-3-85125-855-4-07
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or didactic objects) remain mostly outside the digital. Material can be searched in
library holdings via an individual desk or an office computer, via online catalogues, and
using internet browsers. But it can also take place in the library itself, in interaction with
the library staff at the counter, but also not least by strolling through the aisles and
browsing the holdings. Not least, conversations and discussions among colleagues
about their current work over a cup of coffee or lunch are also important. All these
practices and their material arrangements are inscribed in the teaching material.
Ultimately, however, these socio-material practices are translated into the practices
that produce digital learning objects. It should be noted that any consideration of open
educational resources usually starts with the requisite end product. This fact must be
considered in that, in their production practices, educational resources can only be
labelled “open” at a later point in time through open licences. The decision to publish
material does not necessarily have to be made at the beginning of the interwoven
practices. The creation and use of learning and teaching material does not mean that
it is also publicly available as an OER (Beaven, 2018).
The normative context of open educational resources is evident in the technical
framework for making media available and the policy framework that sets the definition
of OER. The relevant infrastructures will require their users to apply a certain method
that will suggest the creation of resources in line with the OER model. Online
educational infrastructures are, by definition, available on the internet; they can take
the form of learning management systems integrated into the everyday media
practices of courses (the open-source platforms Moodle or ILIAS are examples) or
separate repositories outside of the everyday media practices of course modules.
Repositories are document servers that secure digital learning objects and their
metadata, describe the objects in a structured manner, and make them accessible. In
the case of OER repositories, they are a form of virtual library providing more than just
digitised books. They treat OER as normative objects in line with the OER model. They
create an ordered openness for digital learning objects. The services sometimes
contain the material for entire course modules or structured individual material and are
aimed at teachers and/or learners; the material can either be downloaded or accessed
within the service environment. In the TIB AV portal, for example, the videos can be
accessed and viewed directly in a browser. In addition, the portal provides automatic
video analyses for the videos in real time, for example, allowing written language (e.g.
text on transparencies) to be searched through text recognition and spoken language
to be displayed in the video as a transcript and made searchable through voice
recognition. The repository can thus become a virtual reading room or lecture hall.
Repositories allow different actions by users, while also preventing other actions by
simply not including them in their setup, e.g., direct editing resources in text, picture,
audio or video. These medially conveyed options for action are the mediators between
Proceedings of the STS Conference Graz 2021
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DOI: 10.3217/978-3-85125-855-4-07
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the normative objects and the infrastructure. At the same time, the learning objects are
decontextualized, as they are removed from the original context of the lesson. A
separation of knowledge and context is not appropriate, since knowledge only emerges
in this very context. Furthermore, lessons themselves must be seen as an educational
resource. In this sense of de-/recontextualisation there are no differences between
OER and traditional textbooks, if they stand alone.
The policy framework defines OERs as normative objects. An OER model is created
and is then used to define what constitutes OER. Educational policymakers, activists
in the open educational resources movement, and academics in media didactics,
educational science, computer science, and library and information science continue
to work on this model by providing recommendations, definitions and policies. To
borrow a term from Eva Barlösius (2019, p. 21), these actors can be referred to as
“infrastructurists”. The OER model is transforming the concept of education and
learning/teaching materials. In various countries, OER policies are being developed
that concentrate on the production and provision of OER and whose educational policy
goals correspond to the normative model of OER. At the same time, however, it should
be noted that these policies do not automatically mean that this model is adopted in
the teachers’ and learners’ practices (Bossu and Stagg, 2018; Mulder, 2013; Stacey,
2013). Michael Kerres and Richard Heinen (2015, p. 34) propose a focus on
infrastructural framework conditions in order to promote the spread of OER (see also
Heck et al., 2020). Infrastructurists are trying to implement the theoretical assumptions
of open education in the repositories as well as structure and promote OER usage.
With this in mind, search systems and metadata schemes are being developed that
should make it easier to find the learning objects described in the metadata.
The use of infrastructures should assist university instructors in the creation of OER.
By searching for or finding and creating materials, their options for action become free.
Searching for external material is part of any teacher’s practice (Beaven, 2018), but
this takes place less specifically in OER repositories than in general online (Baas et
al., 2019). Open solutions activists generally assume that educational materials can
be produced by university lecturers and students in the course of their teaching and
learning activities and (voluntarily) made available to the academic public. By using
digital learning platforms such as Moodle or ILIAS, teaching practices can be changed
and restructured in such a way that they favour the creation of OER. The OER
community refers to teaching practices as “open educational practices”. Yet OER
remain a niche phenomenon. Beaven (2018) emphasizes that the use and sharing of
teaching and learning material within a community, between students and teachers
and among colleagues is common, but invisible and done in private, in what she calls
a “dark reuse” (see also Baas et al., 2019). The public sharing of self-created materials
Proceedings of the STS Conference Graz 2021
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as OER occurs only to a very limited extent, but, when it is done, it takes place in public
repositories (Cardoso et al., 2019).
The OER community describes the practice of use as follows: OER is used to
integrate and supplement learning and teaching materials in one’s own course
modules. OER can be used to validate, review and/or improve one’s own learning and
teaching materials (Rodés et al., 2019). Content can be changed to make adjustments
for individual contexts (Cardoso et al., 2019). Formal changes, such as tweaks to the
wording, predominate (Beaven, 2018). While pictures, videos and online textbooks
come mainly from the internet, presentations, exam materials, portfolios and course
modules are either created by the user or “borrowed” from colleagues (Baas et al.,
2019). Learning and teaching materials can also be adopted without changes. OER
can be made available to students as additional learning and teaching materials, e.g.
as self-learning units.
This comes close to the OER model for open educational resources and
infrastructures. Terms such as ‘change’ and ‘adaptation’ are in the foreground. The
use and acceptance of open educational resources is also the subject of research in
order to develop further top-down approaches to help transform OER from a niche
existence into a mass phenomenon. Open educational resources must therefore also
be understood as boundary objects (Bowker and Star, 2000; Star and Griesemer,
1989), since they obviously mean different things for teachers, learners and
infrastructurists. These different meanings are currently a blind spot in research, which
ought to be included in the calls for further research on the transformation of higher
education (Király and Géring, 2019, 2020) and OER (Zawacki-Richter et al., 2020).
Now that OER has been shown both in its status as an object and in its constitution in
the plenum of practices and material arrangements, a sample educational
infrastructure is introduced to show its performativity.
4 Functions of Repositories
Following a qualitative content analysis (Mayring, 2014) of documents (Flick, 2018;
Rapley and Rees, 2017, pp. 375–389; Wein, 2020) held by 29 German-speaking
higher education repositories which make learning and teaching material openly
available, the TIB AV portal was selected as the example for this paper. TIB AV-Portal
went online in spring 2014. The portal is continuously developed and operated by a
team of TIB (German National Library of Science and Technology). It is a web-based
provider of academic videos with a focus on technology, mathematics and natural
science, including lecture and conference recordings as well as (open) audio-visual
learning and teaching materials. Services offered by the portal are hosting and long-
term archiving of videos; automatic metadata enrichment; permanent citation with
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Digital Object Identifier (DOI); linking between video, scientific papers, research data,
NameIDs; semantic search; and legally compliant publishing practices. The portal is
not an exclusive OER provider. Within its collection on the basis of free licensing (via
CC), many videos are not only accessible online and can also be re-used. So, the
portal is for academic use. The portal can be used by scientists as well as lecturers
and students.
Digital Open Educational Resources are relationally and ecologically intertwined with
infrastructures (Star, 1999, p. 377) and their users in several ways. The OER sorts the
participants, namely through their different technical and media performance with the
(un)availability of resources in archives, how they process them at work stations, and
use them in (virtual) classrooms. If the transformation of the term teaching material is
taken seriously, one must ask how the intended services of an OER are provided in
infrastructures. How is the OER model mapped and represented in the infrastructures?
OER infrastructures usually offer four core functions on their user interface, which can
be understood as a service: (1) Search, (2) Organise, (3) Help (Manual) and (4)
Delivery.
Search: Searching and, hopefully, finding take place in the interaction between
search services and users as searchers. Information in a complex field of knowledge
is subject to search queries, especially if the complexity of the knowledge base is
increased by different storage locations and the abundance of documents. The service
of searching can be differentiated into two levels of search practices: the first level
helps users learn how to perform a search within that service, while the second level
enables acquisition of the actual piece of knowledge. Users must be readily able to
make competent use of the service and so must be (self) trained in its use. By opting
to use the service, it can be assumed that users will be able to use it through their
(search) practices in order to fulfil their customer wishes and information needs. A
second assumption is that users are already quite aware of what they are seeking, but
the material must be made findable by tagging it with metadata. In addition, a certain
user competence in dealing with search systems is required.
Organise: This service is mostly represented in the organisation of lists. Found
documents can be saved in collections and thus made available as a list. Materials can
then be added to or removed from the collections. The collections can then be shared
publicly or privately. Collections can be created collaboratively. This creates a form of
ordered and shared openness, not only through the list itself, but also through the
relationships between the objects in the list and the people who create the list. To a
certain extent, the possibilities of these collections as lists can be equated with syllabi
and reading lists.
Help (Manual): The use of documents and data also includes answering questions
about copyright as part of the services needed to turn users into competent
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Fig. 2. License agreement
(independent) users. Infrastructures thus address users through help pages or
manuals for self-socialisation. The rights and obligations of the service and users as
contractual partners are presented in the service’s terms of use, which not only
describe the functions offered by the service, but also how these functions may and
can be used. Figure 2 shows the help for license agreements, needed in the upload
function to select and grant an open licence for the material.
Delivery: The learning objects are delivered from the contributor (author) to the
online platform. Delivery describes the technical practice in repositories fulfilled by
direct upload or sending the learning object to an editorial board. Delivery does not
describe the social and collaborative aspect of contributions and the accretion of
knowledge. The upload area needs to be designed in such a way that persistent
identifiers (e.g., digital object identifiers (DOIs)) are assigned to the documents
(automatically). Users as deliverers provide information on the title, a description of the
material, its authors, etc. The users should provide as much metadata as possible to
describe their material. In addition, they need to select and grant an open licence for
the material. Figure 3 shows the drop-down menu for licencing.
The OER model is explained in both the help and upload functions of the
infrastructure. The OER model and the restrictions on production are replicated in the
infrastructure. The social norms of open and public access are provided by the service.
The content can be accessed without payment or membership restrictions. Because
the material can be accessed directly in an internet browser, there is no need to use
software, which in turn is only available behind paywalls or membership barriers. The
legal norms are stated by the explanations within the help function as well as in the
pre-configuration of the upload function, which in the case of the AV portal strongly
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Fig. 3. Legal information
recommends users grant free licences. It should be noted that the AV portal also allows
objects to be published without free licences. This means that the material licensed in
this way is publicly available (open access), but may not be edited without obtaining
further permission. Other services only allow free licences to be issued. In their
technical framework, digital infrastructures make open educational resources medially
available. Due to the technical framing, OERs are made available for reproduction in
infrastructures, i.e., the repositories. The OER model is performatively inscribed into
the infrastructures. However, this does not yet say whether they do justice to the
interaction order of making learning and teaching material available and thus help
actors in the education system.
5 Conclusion
The idea of open education has a long history (Peter and Deimann, 2013), which to
this day is linked to “opening up education” (European Commission, 2013) and is linked
to social issues such as: “Educational equity, fairness and inclusion, caring for the
diversity of learners, open curricula and social responsibility” (Kerres and Heinen,
2015, p. 34). OER in terms of normative objects are performatively produced through
repositories. The social norm of public availability and the legal norm of open
processing through the granting of open licences are conveyed by the way the
repositories are set up. However, this does not say whether the repositories actually
implement the normative model of OER for the sake of an increase in educational
equality and quality. At least, this has not yet been implemented in the repository
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technology; it lies in the resources themselves. The policy discourse around OER is
not only dominated by political decision-makers, educational scientists and technicians
and the perspective of university lecturers seems to be insufficiently included, so one
can also speak of policy by design. It remains to be seen whether the implementation
of digitalisation strategies will entail more than just transferring traditional practices,
information and knowledge into a new medium (mere digitisation). In response to the
question of how OER influences the interests of teaching and learning in relation to
their content, this paper has shown that OER as visualising objects are to be
understood as everyday educational resources and thus, in their current form, more
than the mere digitisation of traditional solutions.
When understood as normative objects, OER can be seen as trying to help
revolutionise education as expressed in various national policies. Through policy
making, political decision-makers use OER to increase pressure towards social,
economic and technological change in the education system in order to achieve the
normative educational goals of increasing educational equality and quality. Within the
open educational resources movement, the availability of professional, open teaching
and learning materials and the associated opportunities for digital learning are
perceived as a means to reach these goals. Judging the contribution OER can make
to increased equal opportunities will only be possible when the OER movement is
expressed in pedagogy. Either way, the established practices of teachers are put at
stake. And many tend to act conservatively and maintain their academic norms and
traditions. OER will put university lecturers into a new public sphere, removing them
from the familiarity of seminar rooms and lecture halls into the public sphere of the
World Wide Web. This not only has consequences on the visibility of their teaching
work, but also has consequences for the legal status of the materials used in teaching.
In this form, the digitization of learning and teaching materials through OER can
transform teaching and learning issues into place and method in the long term if
distance learning continues to gain importance. In this sense, digital educational
infrastructures and learning objects will also gain in importance. For future research,
the following questions about their constitutive role in practice must be asked for
educational infrastructures as digital objects: (1) How do infrastructures change the
knowledge base of their users? (2) What do learning objects mean for participants?
The fact that the educational goals of increasing educational equality and the quality
of education go hand-in-hand with a promise of economisation through time savings
and cost efficiency raises the question of the extent to which the education system will
not follow its own inherent logic, but instead subordinate itself to the logic of the
economic system and confuse the goals of education with those of capitalism.
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