Finally I managed to get my slides from my presentation at the ICCE2010 to slideshare. This is a bit of a negative record for me because the workshop was already three months back. The workshop was about "Open Standards in Open Education" and the paper reported on the results from several research projects that focused on open educational resources (OER). While the rest of the world is still reasoning about publishing educational resources and if openness is a good thing or not, we were looking at the real problems that educators, organisations and system administrators face alike.  

Around spring last year Marco, Marion, Marcus and I were discussing the relation of educational resources and standards as part of a educational production process. This discussion has been triggered by the work of several projects we were involved in and in which we studied how to improve the use of open educational resources. While integrating our experiences, we figured that OER is not just about publishing and using resources. Instead, OER really refers to a process cycle of creating, arranging, sharing, searching, delivering, and enriching. Putting resources online is really only the first step, but already at this step many institutions fail to provide resources in a way that supports the OER lifecycle. On the other hand, doing so is not an easy task and certainly not fully supported by open standards. 

In this presentation we outline the OER lifecycle and the related standards that are already in place. 

In the presentation I drew the OER lifecycle continuous, but the truth is that it is still full of gaps and at all levels we find open questions for research. With the related paper we try to raise some awareness to these issues in the wider TEL research community (and in this case to the Asian parts).