Topic 5: Open Educational Practices

Beyond Open Access...


Oasis in the middle of Sahara Desert - My Sahara desert adventure FEB2011
When I started checking the suggested readings and resources for Topic 5: Open Educational Practices from ONL151 course main site, the term "resilience" from Weller, M., & Anderson, T. (2013) got my first attention. Aside from it sounds good to my ear :) I guess, resilience in general means the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties and I think that is really positive when it comes to education. Perhaps, digital resilience will be a big factor to achieve the life-long learning process since a lot of people are trying to contribute to the innovation of education.
Well, I can say that Open Educational Practices (OEP) is good and beneficial because it supports the generation and use/reuse of high-quality Open Educational Resources (OER) governing policies, promoting advanced pedagogical models and empowering students to become co-contributors of their life long learning path. Students can actually benefit from different learning resources to enhance and support different learning techniques. On the other hand, teachers may value online resources to enable them to enrich their students learning experience that spending time developing their own resources. 

In my own experience, developing materials is a tedious task since you are not just focusing on the content itself but also the proper structure and design. Most especially I am very careful in using materials available on the web because of the integrity of the data being written and the different policies that I might accidentally disregard. In fact, I was so happy to know more about "Creative Common" from this course especially those videos that Alastair Creelman shared with the community. Honestly, I am not really familiar with it before though I always see the logos in different resources. I just thought of it as a designing company protecting their rights on their own resources. Surprisingly, I learned more and found it very useful in sharing resources freely and protect the copyrights of my resources to prevent duplication.

I guess one of the challenges of OER/OEP is the level of openness, how open the resources should be? When I was working with my dissertation proposal, I saw a lot of good papers that will be helpful to my studies, however, it will end up like a teaser to subscribe and avail the unlimited resources they have. They will often give you different plans to choose from that will start from being a free member with very limited access to the unlimited accept subscription that will cost you money but you can enjoy all the resources they have. Well, it is disappointing that education nowadays is more on business based that contradicts the idea of being really OPEN. When I was still teaching in Libya, I cannot find ways of enhancing my career so I decided to enroll in Alison.com and other sites offering MOOCS like Udemy, Coursera, Linda etc. and so far I only finished one and until now I was not able to get the certificate yet.

The way I see it, MOOC courses are advisable to ordinary students of shall we say beginners instead it is more favorable to working professionals who want to enhance their career and broaden their knowledge in their own field of expertise but no time to attend the traditional classroom settings. They can save their own money and time studying wherever it is comfortable for them.

Where should I go from here?

Well, now that I have learned a lot from ONL151 course, I should start enhancing my resources and apply what I have learned and share my presentation in SlideShare, make a video recording of my own lectures and make it available on the web for the students who are interested to learn, completely for free. Perhaps, I should also start adapting different licensing Creative Commons are providing for my resources protection as well.

Comments

Unknown said…
Good luck on you continued journey toward openess in learning. I hope our roads will cross again in the future!
jocontreras said…
Thank you very much Greger, it was a nice experienced working with you in the group. Hope to meet you in person. Good luck!
jocontreras said…
Thank you very much Greger, it was a nice experienced working with you in the group. Hope to meet you in person. Good luck!

I want to give you this link: http://www.powtoon.com/ , maybe you will find it interesting to make your presentation in different way!

Popular Posts