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/
Hamish it looks like you are heading down the open education pathway. You are so right about the change in how we are providing information to students. Developing skills in accessing and managing digital information is essential these days. Although students may appear adept at using the Internet, as you say they often don't know what is relevant or appropriate, nor do they know how to use social media technologies for learning. So this is the teacher's role to show them how, and modelling how to use the technologies is an important part of this.
ReplyDeleteMany people do believe everything they read so teaching students to think critically is a very important part of developing digital information literacy. Teachers do need high level skills in these areas - to be 'one step ahead' of the students.
How do you think that using OER can save teachers time? And how can putting our materials in an open environment benefit you professionally? Things to think about. A very good post, and one more to go.