Showcase post by Yun Chen March 27, 2020
Today, I will be writing a showcase post of EDCI 339 based on my reflection post 2 which was focusing on the Open Educational Resources (OER) and accessible online educational resources. Moreover, as we are working approach to the near end of the term, I believe that I have learnt a lot about distributed and open learning. Also, I hope this post will be well presenting my knowledge and understanding of the topic.
Speaking of Open Education Resources (OER), it defined as freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes. ( “Open Educational Resources“, n.d.) It means a general category that all the resources and materials that we could use for any educational level. For a better understanding and why it is important in the open learning world, here is a clip from TED that focusing on the topic of OER.
Many people may not be aware of, but open educational resources has given us many benefits on every perspectives. As in the article of ” The Importance Of Open Educational Resources” mentioned, being able to get useful and accessible online materials is getting more and more important these days.
First of all, cost is always the topic we have talked about. In the traditional ways of learning, textbooks and supplies are getting more expensive more ever before. As the article stated: ” rising at a rate higher than most other consumer goods” (“The Importance Of Open Educational Resources”, n.d.) As the chart is showing below (see fig.1):
(Fig. 1. The graph of comparison of consumer price index on different commodities between educational books and supplies, all items and apparel. Graph from The Importance Of Open Educational Resources. (n.d.). Retrieved March 27, 2020, from https://canvas.instructure.com/courses/815700/pages/the-importance-of-open-education-resources.)
Therefore, compared to the mostly free online accessible resources. The actual and physical textbooks lost their advantages. Open Educational Resources gives every student a chance to learn at a very low cost when the textbook is no longer necessary to the students.
Next, OER gives instructors the access to customize or even personalize the martial that they need. This make the class much more flexible than the traditional way. For example, a teacher only needs some parts of knowledge from the traditional textbook and the teacher also wants to add some particular content to let the students make a better understanding of the knowledge for this specific class. The flexibility of OER could be extremely help in his scenario where teacher could have the access to edit the material and make it more suitable for the students. Also, this is the benefit that old textbook does not have, that instructor will only get the strong related material to the class. Here is another video that showing that to relate the classes with OER:
Furthermore, OER has the opportunity to be better as long as it is editable online. The same martial can be edited by every student and teacher online around the world. This is not only useful in the educational area, but also in some other fields where the same work needs to be enhanced by different people working on the same object and sharing the same interest. That can
OER also has wide variety of materials that we can use. We used to need multiple textbooks or asking different teachers to understand the knowledge from class. By using OER we can get much more information from every angle about the same object. Sometimes, a user does not have to gather all the information, there is already someone generated all the knowledge for you there and waiting for you to explore. Now with OER we can get the knowledge from zero to success just through a click and search.
Once more, we need to bring up the evaluation guide of OER for reviewing the OER resources. we could use this guide while we are trying to evaluate the usefulness of the OER resources. Relevance, acurancy, production quality, accessibility, interactivity and licensing are the six measures of OER material. By using this guide, we will have the ability to identify the usefulness of an open resources in order to decide which material is useful for us.
OER also can be really useful in our professional areas when we are not in the educational world. OER is practical, because of the huge development of modern technology. We could be able to find solutions through OER for the real problems from our day-to-day life. There is always something we can learn from the from the online open knowledge.
References
Open educational resources. (2020, March 19). Retrieved March 27, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources
The Importance Of Open Educational Resources. (n.d.). Retrieved March 27, 2020, from https://canvas.instructure.com/courses/815700/pages/the-importance-of-open-education-resources.