With the ever-changing landscape of education, open-education has a dominant place in the world of academia along side in-person classroom settings. Platforms have been made available and carefully designed to support open education settings. This week’s course readings have been very delightful as it laid out the basis of good Open Educational Resources (OER) sites and its uses. Prior to this week’s readings, the OER is an area where I have been uncertain of, primarily their usage, procedures, and accessibility. In this blog post, I will explore the definition behind OER and how I resonate with the resources as provided.
Open Educational Resources (OERs) are teaching, learning and research materials in different formats. The OER reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. (UNESCO, 2018, p. 2). In a way, textbooks and course materials can all be unified and stored within the OER.
From a personal standpoint, the accessibility of learning materials have been easier than ever. In the past, the usage of textbooks and printed materials have been the norm. However in recent times, the adoption of e-books and online-based reading materials have been widely available and often very affordable with a small subscription cost. There is a caveat however and that is the adaptation to reading course materials and textbooks on the computer or a tablet instead of texts on paper. I have peers who have trouble and grapples with this change of reading style and many have transitioned back to hardcopy textbooks or simply printing out sections of reading materials.
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In the realm of OER and it’s availabilities, it allows easy access to affordable resources for both students and instructors alike. It is important to note that distributed learning is widely embraced due to it’s flexility with materials. And in direct comparison, open learning offers bigger room for plasticity in terms of costs and convenience to campus library journal and resources for students. In short, the ease of access to OER with online libraries and academic research journals for students is a large factor, this is primarily because it negates having to be physically on campus in order to access the aforementioned materials.
I strongly feel that open learning is both mindset and value based. A personal experience in relation to this is the interdisciplinary program that I took part in the past. The Human Kinetics (Kinesiology) at UBC offered an interdisciplinary stream, and this enabled students to take the core program courses, while having the flexibility of self-picking electives that he or she feels adhere to her studies in Kinesiology. In a way, the student must be well disciplined and self-pace with the offered learning materials. At often times, the student is required to visit clinic sites to observe physiotherapy being practiced and at the same time, appropriately access OER and knowledge bases for learning instructions.
Open Educational Practices (OEP) are, “collaborative practices that include the creation, use, and reuse of OER (Open Educational Resources), as well as pedagogical practices employing participatory technologies, and social networks for interaction, peer-learning, knowledge creation, and empowerment of learners” (Cronin, 2017, p. 18). After careful review of this week’s readings, I feel that OEP is critical to both students and instructors because it offers guidelines to best practices and frameworks to educational material creation.
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What is next in line in online learning? An unpopular opinion of mine is that I don’t think new ideas will present itself. Instead, I feel that educators will simply improve upon current practices and guidelines. As an example, better incorporation of embedded learning videos can be better improved upon. Videos are often embedded via JavaScript, and this can be an issue when viewed on different computer and tablet devices; as contents are encounter play-back errors. A potential workaround to this is linking the aforementioned videos to a site like Youtube, as this imaginably provides better stability and accessibility. All in all, both OER and OEP will help to expand the educational horizons for educations around the globe!
References
“Learning Pathways: Open Education Online Tutorials: OER Africa.” Learning Pathways: Open Education Online Tutorials | OER Africa, www.oerafrica.org/book/learning-pathways-open-education-online-tutorials.
Nice post Andrew!
I also had little to no understanding of open educational resources prior to this weeks course readings and activities. Your definition and understanding of OERs is clearly demonstrated and relayed within your post so it was very easy for me to understand your viewpoint concerning open textbooks and journals. These resources also resonated with me, and I briefly touched on this in my post, so I enjoyed reading about your experiences with them as well as their obvious benefits and some not-so-obvious drawbacks. Overall your post was very well written and informative, I’m looking forward to reading the next one!