Open Education; issues and challenges

Open Education, the emerging trend of online learning which became a reality through Open Educational Resources (OER).  The development of OER is a long process which requires a high cost and long-term planning even they are available to access through the Internet free of charges.

There are a lot of challenges and issues which the OER development team has to concern in the teachers’, developers’ and learners’ perspectives. However, I have categorised the issues and barriers according to the responsible party to address them as follows.

  1. Implementation issues in the design and development stages
  2. Adaptation and maintaining issues in the delivery stage

The following 3 issues which I concern as very important since they are required to consider at the initial stage of the design and development of OERs.  I believe these three issues are the foundation for the whole project and scaffold to address for the next stage issues like; sustainability and learner support. These issues have to be addressed within the organisation.

Pedagogy 

Initially, with the development of learning objects, there was no consideration of pedagogical aspects in online teaching and learning. Most developers only considered the technology and the content for online teaching materials. But leaners find such learning is not motivational.

Quality

Everybody expects the quality of the content, delivery method and novel information in all the online resources. Therefore we need to maintain the quality in all the aspects of OERs.

Technology

Present generation mostly refers as the “Google generation” is very confident and familiar with the latest technologies. If the OERs are not embraced with the latest technology, the learner will not tend to adopt it.