International Journal of Open Educational Resources Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2019/Winter 2020 | Page 96

International Journal of Open Educational Resources
tutions who wish to adapt the content
for their own purposes, since adaptation
would require advanced skills or
technical knowledge that the new user
may not have. The tension between precision
and reusability is the least direct
of the three relationships but manifests
itself in two ways. It first appears when
considering the breadth of the intended
audience for the resource. When the intended
audience is narrow and specific
(for example, “library and information
science students in Canada”), the content
can be precise and targeted. This
limits the potential for re-use in other
contexts (for example, “users of public
library makerspaces”) due to the level of
additional customization required. The
second manifestation of this tension is
particularly thorny when considering
“people who may want to reuse this
resource” as an additional audience:
generally focused (and therefore less
precise) resources are more likely to be
selected by downstream educators due
to their broad applicability. The prevalence
of trade-offs formed by triangle of
precision, engagement, and reusability
suggests it is a model that may be worth
considering by others creating OER,
and in particular those designing for
multiple audiences.
Figure 1: Precision, engagement and re-usability relationship.
The project team’s experience with content
creation and development has revealed
four key areas of influence associated
with balancing the three sides of
the “OER triangle.” Almost every module
developed for the project faced the
following pressures:
1. Capturing and modeling best practices
for copyright compliance within
the modules;
2. Delivering engaging, accurate and
occasionally complex material in a
way that doesn’t violate recommendations
for module length (as advised
in the literature);
3. Ensuring that narratives and examples
employed within the modules
are reflective of the diversity of their
desired audiences; and,
4. Relying as much as possible on tools
and materials that are themselves
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