International Journal of Open Educational Resources Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2019/Winter 2020 | Page 95

Know Your Audience(s): Collaborating for Copyright Education
Method
This paper expands on the existing
literature through a critical
reflection on the University of
Alberta’s OUC project. Defined by Fook
(2012) as a “way of learning from and
reworking experience” (p. 56), critical
reflections are a means of improving the
effectiveness and quality of professional
practice. Drawn from Duncan (2004),
the approach used in this reflection can
be seen as auto-ethnographic, since it
embraces the subjective experiences of
the people directly involved with the
project.
While this approach is not without
limitations and the proximity to
the work by the authors is a source of
bias (Flyvberg, 2004), such closeness
facilitates a more intimate understanding
of the technology and processes involved
in the creation of the materials
necessary for the analysis that follows.
The reflections presented in this paper
should transfer well to any OER project
that uses video and related interactive
features to provide educational material
to multiple audiences with differing
needs and interests.
Key Reflections: An “OER Triangle”
While the multi-unit collaborative
approach has many
advantages, there are also
some important challenges in designing
for multiple audiences, including minimizing
domain-specific language for
highly legalistic subject matter, and balancing
accessibility and comprehensiveness.
These challenges must, in turn, be
balanced against the project’s emphasis
on the re-usability and adaptability of
material. Taken together, these factors
form a triangle of occasionally competing
interests, with “precision,” “engagement,”
and “re-usability” at each apex.
The analog to project management’s
“iron triangle” of scope, schedule,
and cost (Atkinson, 1999) is intentional,
based on recurring themes that
arose in discussions about the design
and implementation of each OER module.
Maximizing precision, engagement,
and re-usability equally during
the OER development process is nearly
impossible, since overemphasis on any
one interest comes at a cost to one or
both of the other two when the project
has an over-arching goal of creating
content for multiple audiences.
The recognition of trade-offs
in OER design stems from one of the
project members’ ongoing scholarship
in this area (Christiansen & McNally,
2018; McNally, 2014; McNally & Christiansen,
2019), and a brief overview of
the tensions created by these trade-offs
illustrates their trilateral nature. First,
there is the balance of precision and
engagement. Here, high attention to
the subject’s connections to detailed legal
language and jurisprudence—more
appropriate and digestible for academic
audiences—may hinder engagement
for members of the general public. The
second tension is inherent when reconciling
engagement and reusability: an
overreliance on advanced multimedia
production techniques to foster interest
in and engagement with the material
can create barriers for other insti-
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