Tuesday 1 October 2013

Flexible learning 6


Open Education Resources (OER/OEP)

Activity 7

Definition of Open Educational Resources

OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.

Definition of Open Educational Practices

Open Educational Practices (OEP) are defined as practices which support the production, use and reuse of high quality open educational resources (OER) through institutional policies, which promote innovative pedagogical models, and respect and empower learners as co-producers on their lifelong learning path. OEP address the whole OER governance community: policy makers, managers and administrators of organizations, educational professionals and learners.

OER & OEP in my context

The theory behind the movement to an open education society does have very good to the effect that we are getting into the mind-set of sharing all knowledge to help others learn and enjoy learning.

All learning becomes a task and then moved away from if it becomes too hard and seems out of reach. In an open educational resources movement all information can be accessed by any one and the learning is unlimited, then the training institutes are in the business of assessing capability.

In this modern world students expect to find the information they need at their fingertips but the drawback is that one cannot always take what they find on the internet as gospel. We are encouraged to listen to their findings and have an open discussion around the topics and compare to our own situations and current working practices. One of the great things about the internet is that it is bringing the world closer together and the ability to have two people thinking alike on different sides of the world is quite common. Then they can share information and develop new ideas better that they would on their own.

The difference from pre-internet days would be the training provider would supply all the necessary content for the students to know without going out of the box to far so the students didn’t get to overwhelmed. Today we have to teach the students skills to manage the information so they can sift through and only take the bits they need, sort of a personal content filter.

In our course we have a selection of approved resources that we encourage the students to use but we also have some activities that challenge the students to find and research new and emerging technology and write a report about it identifying the benefits and legislation requirements.

In these activities we allow the students to explore the industry and get excited of the scope the will have opportunities to go into either during training or after obtaining the qualification, and also give relevance to the material we are teaching.

 

Reference;

http://www.icde.org/en/resources/open_educational_quality_inititiative/definition_of_open_educational_practices/