Activity Seven
OECD (2007) defines Open Education Resources as "digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research."
When it comes to open education practices it is about the sharing of education with others so that everyone benefits and knowledge is not kept as a precious commodity but rather shared and re-shared time and time again so that everyone benefits.
With the increase of on-line social media we see a lot of “ad-hoc” sharing without much thought of who desires access to what. The challenge of OER is to look at ways in which knowledge can be freely shared in a manner which is accessible and reliable. The types of materials that can be shared on-line are only limited by the technology and investment of individuals and organisations time to produce the needed materials.
One large part to this is “buy in” and to that end Otago Polytechnic signed the “Cape Town Open Education Declaration” in 2008. This confirmed both the management and staffs’ desire to be part of this education practice.
One strategy I can use is to take one of my fore mentioned strategies of creating video of some of my lesson activities and make it more widely available. This not only gives my students easier access to the material but hopefully encourages others to do the same and increases the materials available to all.
Open Education is not just limited to individuals doing their own searching on-line, but also provides excellent resources to be used in both off-line and on-line class environments.
We find advantages to being part of the Cisco Academy Programme that freely provides very high quality material to our students for no cost. The encouragement for academy members to create and share their own resources allows a variety of choices when conducting classes. This concept of freely sharing resources is one that benefits more and more people the more it is embraced.
We need to invest short term time and energy into creating these resources for long term gain, through the ability to re-use resources and through the huge gains of being able to share resources internationally.
OECD (2007), Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources, OECD Publishing.
doi: 10.1787/9789264032125-en
doi: 10.1787/9789264032125-en
Go Hamish. Yes some energy and time is required in the first instance, and we need to acknowledge that collaboration does take time initially, but it can save time and energy in the long term - when it works well. I guess to belong to the Cisco academy you have to pay a fee, but we can't expect everything for free. However, the principles of openness and sharing within a professional group or network is another dimension of OER, though the purists would say that $$ should not be involved.
ReplyDeleteHow do you envisage doing this? "Open Education is not just limited to individuals doing their own searching on-line, but also provides excellent resources to be used in both off-line and on-line class environments. "
Diigo or delicious.com - two social networking sites are excellent for sharing resources as are sites like Youtube and flickr.com - if a class area is set up, and all the students are shown how to tag (categorise) material consistently for sharing with the class or how to add to a playlist in youtube.
I have used delicious.com for the Flexible learning class, but it needs to be more formally encouraged as an acitvity. At the moment I am the only person saving materials to delicious so they feed via RSS into: Material just in
I am using the tag: FLG2010