This post is a slightly facetious response to Maha Bali’s post Fixing the shirt but spoiling the trousers #OER17 Open Call for Your Stories! and Sheila MacNeil’s Not so much the a case of the wrong trousers, more like a wardrobe malfunction my story for #oer17

Maha cited the rather fabulous Egyptian expression:

“when you tried to fix the shirt you spoiled the trousers”. It conjures up an image of comedy of errors or such, where trying to fix a problem creates new problems.

I think of “open” as having many such problems that arise out of its solutions, and I already have some examples in mind, but would love for the community to offer me more examples of this.

Sheila chimed in with

Over the past year I think my experience is more of having the right trousers but not the right top/jacket/shoes to go with them. What I mean is, that we have an OER policy in place in our institution which is great, but I’m not wearing “those trousers” as often as I’d like.

Sometimes feels like I have a wardrobe full for OER but nothing to wear

Yes, that is actually my wardrobe.

At the risk of stretching the metaphor until it gets threadbare, perhaps the problem is that the shirt and trousers don’t really fit?  You know you could get them altered so they fit better, but you never quite get round to doing it. Instead you just stick to wearing the clothes with CBF Labels you’ve always worn, the ones you’re comfortable in.  So even if you have an OER repository, it’s a bit of a faff putting stuff in there, it’s easier just to shove your content into the VLE the way you’ve always done.

Or perhaps the shirt and trousers do fit, perhaps they’re beautifully tailored, perfectly fitting, outrageously expensive garments, but now you’ve spent all that money on them you can’t really afford to go out and wear them.  Maybe you’ve invested in an OER strategy or policy or repository, but have you allocated funding to provide the support services, guidance and advice that colleagues will need to actually get on board with OER?

Or maybe the problem is that you didn’t actually want to wear the shirt and trousers in the first place?  Maybe you only bought them because it’s what everyone else wears and you thought you should wear it too.  But really you’d rather wear jeans and a t-shirt, or that amazing vintage dress, or a sparkly frock, of whatever clothes express your individuality. In fact maybe what you want is a whole wardrobe full of clothes to choose from depending on what mood takes you or what job you need to do.  So rather than investing in a single central OER repository because you think that’s what you ought to have, or advocating a specific approach to openness, maybe look at a range of different solutions that will meet the needs of staff and students right across the institutions depending on their differing requirements.

After all, there’s more than one way to be open and wouldn’t it be boring if we all wore the same shirt and trousers? 😉