Community volunteers in collaborative OER development

Abstract

The purpose of this comparative case study is to explore and examine the practices of open course design and development community volunteers undertaken in the Open Education Resource universitas (OERu) network, an international partnership of member post-secondary institutions. With a focus on the design and development of an OER-based university-level course, the study identifies and describes features of an OERu open design and development volunteer community and compares and contrasts it to a similar community in the free and open source software (FOSS) development field.