Thursday, November 4, 2010

OER & OCW

For week 6.

Open Educational Resources (OER) and OpenCourseWare (OCW), and the latter can be seen as part of the former.

This week we have gained an understanding of the OER construction and sustainability all over the world, and had a glimpse of a variety of OpenCourseware projects.

What's worth mentioning is the Open Educational Resources movement. This movement can be considered to start with the strategic plan Using Information Technology to Increase Access to High-Quality Educational Content in 2002. OER is a sharing of digital learning resources over the Internet among institutions and individuals, openly and for free. Its official definition is “digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research." It can include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge. It is a global development, involving over 300 universities from US, China, Japan, Europe and so forth. The amount of open access courses (OpenCourseWare) has surpassed 3000. One of the most well-known example is the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative.

Some comments:
  • Open Education Resources "can be an efficient way of promoting lifelong learning, both for individuals and for government, and can bridge the gap between non-formal, informal and formal learning." 
  • Its sharing-for-free feature is in common with that of all the other topics about open sources we have discussed, which I believe to be an important component of "gift culture". Connective theory comes up with the concept of "information flow". And I think OER has promoted an academic information flow globally.
  • Same as all the free-sharing stuff on the Internet, copyright issue arouses to OER. In an era when knowledge is attributable to some certain people and can bring profits, we seem in need of making a balance between respecting the right of the author and promoting and sustaining collaboration and resource sharing.
Here are some of the provided suggestions to improve the development of OER and OCW, which I think are interesting or important:
  • Recommendations for educational policy makers and funding bodies: promote open educational practices that allow for acquiring competences and skills that are necessary to participate successfully in the knowledge society; demand public-private partnerships to concentrate on ventures for innovating educational practices and resources.
  • Recommendations for boards, directors and supervisors of educational institutions: establish reward mechanisms and supportive measures for developing and sharing of Open Educational Resources and experiences; clarify copyrights and define licensing schemes for making Open Educational Resources available.
  •  Recommendations for teachers: make use of tools and services that support collaborative learning processes and learning communities; share proven learning designs, content and experiences through open access repositories and open licenses.
  • Recommendations for students: develop one's own ePortfolis and make study results accessible to others; respect IPR/copyright of others and make one's own creative work accessible under an open content license.
  • Recommendations for educational repositories: do not follow a top-down strategy of delivering learning objects; empower teachers and learners; make licensing of content as easy as possible; assist open content initiatives in the creation of rich metadata and provide semantically enhanced access to resources.
  • Recommendations for developers and implementers of e-learning tools and environments: involve teachers and students in the development of learning tools; favour institutional learning environments that support group-based, collaborative learning practices.
Relevant articles:
Giving knowledge for free: The emergence of open educational resources. OECD 
      Publishing: Centre for Educational Research and Innovation. (2007). (153 pages).
Geser, Guntram (ed.). (2007, January). Open Educational Practices and Resources: 
      OLCOS Roadmap 2012 (149 pages). Retrieved on June 25, 2010, from

    1 comment:

    1. As far as I am concerned, the beauty of OER is that OER provides portals that enables learners to gain access to high-quality educational resources in systematic and neat ways. In the past, although there are a lot of learning materials, plenty of educational resources were locked up behind passwords within the prorietary systems. On top of that, the lack of systematically managing educational resources really led to the majority of educational resources of limited use.

      Therefore, the emergence of OER not only provides aceess to learning materials, but also satisfies learners' needs in a secure way; it allows educational resources to be distributed under copyright-licenses like Creative Commons (CC).

      Jason

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