Still, the title’s a nice wind-up

Alan, I agree that for many people who’ve been involved in Learning Object initiatives OER is a logical next step, for many learning technologists and involved academics it is a natural extension or evolution of the desire to share which you note.

On the tech side of the distinction
I think the, admittedly minor, difference emerges more for those completely new to this area, who either through reading papers from the heyday of ‘learning objects’ or from getting advice from some groups make the assumption that releasing OERs requires a repository, LOM records, and IMS CP or SCORM packages. This is certainly one valid technical approach but not the only one.
In the context of the first round of UKOER we had the inverse of the challenge that David addresses in his keynote, in that we were trying to point out to OER projects that it wasn’t compulsory to become Learning Object repositories in order to release OER.

David – I’m intrigued by the presence of ‘Durable’ on that slide; though I’ll need to read through the rest of the slides to check I’ve understood your usage correctly, the debates around the preservation of learning materials tend to a fairly inconclusive case for durable (as much as I might like there to be one).

http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/IR&CISOPTR=808&CISOBOX=1&REC=5

And at this year’s Latin American Conference on Learning Objects I argued strongly that “learning objects 2.0″ is an appropriate way to think of OER for people who were familiar with the LO construct. See slide 109 in http://www.slideshare.net/opencontent/laclo-2010-openness-and-analytics-the-future-of-learning-objects for a visual.

II see the difference more in the context of the times the arose- RLOs being when the web was bubbling up as a resource of information, but most of the content creation was focused more on the desktop delivery. I was building some of these things at the time in tools like Macromedia Director and others were doing Java applets and early flash pieces. I was of a broader scope of what might be an RLO than your definition, it was 2000 when I worked on the Maricopa Learning eXchange which I see still lives http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/mlx and we included any item created for learning with the loose metaphor of a “package.”

Over time we saw in places like MERLOT that the items shifted from things we might feel ok calling RLOs to broader things like a web site for teaching study skills, that today (if licensed) we’d more likely call OERs.

The dreams in the RLO days that we’d have tools to scoop up sly the objects and process them out as a complete piece of content or activity made of disparate parts. That was partially achieved in places but not broadly. The difference is now I guess that it is left to us, the finders of OERs to assemble or link.

To me, I care less about the differences and more about people sharing more bit of what they made and their ideas about it.

RLO ? OER

(I think).

Great post, thank you!