Post on 14-Jul-2015
Open
Education
Resources
The Benefit, Challenges and Opportunities!
By Sandra K. Campbell
Open Education Resources:
Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely accessible,
openly licensed documents and media that are useful for
teaching, learning, educational, assessment and research
purposes. Although some people consider the use of an open
format to be an essential characteristic of OER, this is not a
universally acknowledged requirement.
The development and promotion of open educational
resources is often motivated by a desire to curb the
commodification of knowledge[1] and provide an alternate or
enhanced educational paradigm.[2] Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
OER
Used to gain information, and enhancement of skills and
knowledge or to help with remediation in an area.
Knowledge available for global population use.
Can be self-paced.
Available for teachers use in a classroom as supplemental or
main material on chosen topics.
OER provides an opportunity to share knowledge and
experiences globally.
OER can create interactive experiences.
A means for people to share their expertise on a topic.
Benefits
Global digital divide creates inequality in technology
availability.
The accuracy and validity of the material needs to be
verified.
Knowing where to look to find OERs.
Improving and increasing the number of good quality
OERs in a variety of subject areas.
As technology becomes more advanced will OERs still be
a viable source?
Challenges
Opportunities
As technology improves and more and more people are
able to login to the internet, they will be able to find OERs for
their personal gain of knowledge or as a resource for
educators to supplement or be the complete material source
for a subject.
Many educational institutions are producing OER materials—
they could be educators of how and why OERs are of value.
Technology will become more accessible to the public which
means people will be able to retrieve OERs more readily.
Education will turn more and more to the internet as
technology improves which means well managed and
improved OERs will become needed and necessary.
Comments!