In the film There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’s character utters an infamous line about drinking a milkshake through a very long straw during a rather traumatic argument. The line in the movie is a reference to drilling for oil on an adjacent property in order to drain the oil reserve under the current property owner’s land – essentially stealing the natural resources.  While I’m certainly not encouraging theft or other illegal activity, I do plan to “steal” resources from across the web in my online course.

For the purpose of developing an online course about the use of ePortfolios, I am using a digital textbook provided by CampusPress, videos hosted on YouTube, and referencing dozens of other websites and online tutorials. Like Daniel’s really long straw, I am sucking these resources into my online course and allowing the participants to access them through my LMS.  The videos are all being embedded in the course content pages, and direct links are also being provided for those who prefer to access the videos directly.

One of the drawbacks about this approach of using publicly available and shared resources is that sometimes the links change or the content is otherwise removed.  Much like when we started EDLD 5302, the Mindset Online site that was referenced throughout Blackboard was down and hasn’t been restored since.  In those situations, it is extremely important to be flexible and to quickly provide alternative resources.  With the exception of the CampusPress textbook, all of the resources in my course are from different sources.  This will allow me to quickly and easily replace one offline resource with another.  [Note: If YouTube goes down, we’re all in big trouble.]

This type of situation is not unlike that for other OER content.  As new versions of OER materials are released, older versions may either stop being updated or will be replaced entirely.  Since the ownership of OER primarily remains with the author or their resource host, they too could decide to withdraw an OER at any time.  If an OER was published under a Creative Commons license, it may be possible that another copy exists online, but it may also not be. Using Tony Bates’ book as an example, when we were provided with the link to download this book, it existed in multiple formats (EPUB, Digital PDF, Print PDF, and a few others).  It also had links to a newer Second Edition version that also was available in multiple formats.  As students, we had to develop the digital skills necessary to find the right version of the book in the right format for the devices we were using.  In my case, I downloaded the First Edition in EPUB format so that I could read on my iPad, but I also downloaded the Second Edition in PDF so that I could print out sections as needed.