The third annual Open Education Week takes place from March
10-15, both online and offline around the world. Through the events and
resources, we hope to reach out to more people to demonstrate what kind of
opportunities open education has created and what we have to look forward to.
Some FAQs about OER
What are OER? The concept of Open Educational
Resources (OER) describes any educational resources (including curriculum maps,
course materials, textbooks, streaming videos, multimedia applications, podcasts,
and any other materials that have been designed for use in teaching and
learning) that are openly available for use by educators and students, without
an accompanying need to pay royalties or license fees.
Importantly, there is only one key differentiator between an
OER and any other educational resource: its license. Thus, an OER is simply an
educational resource that incorporates a license that facilitates reuse, and
potentially adaptation, without first requesting permission from the copyright
holder.
How can education benefit by harnessing OER? The most
important reason for harnessing OER is that openly licensed educational
materials have tremendous potential to contribute to improving the quality and
effectiveness of education.
The transformative educational potential of OER revolves around three linked
possibilities:
1. The
principle of allowing adaptation of materials provides one mechanism amongst
many for constructing roles for students as active participants in educational
processes, who learn best by doing and creating, not by passively reading and
absorbing. Content licenses that encourage activity and creation by students
through re-use and adaptation of that content can make a significant
contribution to creating more effective learning environments.
2. OER
has potential to build capacity by providing institutions and educators access,
at low or no cost, to the means of production to develop their competence in
producing educational materials and carrying out the necessary instructional
design to integrate such materials into high quality programs of learning.
3. Deliberate
openness thus acknowledges that:
·
Investment in designing effective educational
environments is critically important to good education.
·
A key to productive systems is to build on
common intellectual capital, rather than duplicating similar efforts.
·
All things being equal, collaboration will
improve quality.
·
As education is a contextualized practice, it is
important to make it easy to adapt materials imported from different settings
where this is required, and this should be encouraged rather than restricted.
Watch for more information on OER as we move closer to OER Week 2014.
If you have questions about OER, feel free to contact me at your convenience.
Kelley
L. Meeusen
Kelley L. Meeusen, eLearning Coordinator
253-589-5730
