OER for disseminating ICT knowledge in the local context

The learning materials available on the web had a high impact mainly on informal and nonformal education in a decade ago. However, with the rapid movement of OER could change the OEP from informal/nonformal learning to formal education. Significant achievements of OE during the last decade are free to access to the excellent quality e-books, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) from renowned universities like MIT  and Open University in the UK, embedment of pedagogy and technology.  The considerable increment of OER related research publications exemplifies the popularity of OER due to its cost-effectiveness, learning efficiency, availability, equal access and personalisation. The learning analytics of course which followed a learning design “OER enable pedagogy” has shown the majority of students tend to access different types of OE materials and shows high likeliness of reusing and recommending for others  [1].

Non-profit local educational organisations or authorities like the Ministry of Education, National Institute of Education in Sri Lanka need to harness the OERs which apply to the school curriculum and local educational culture in Sri Lanka since in house development of e-learning material requires a high budget and skilled personnel. The challenge is how to find suitable OERs relevant to the learning design of the course to achieve the learning outcomes. Open pedagogy, a new term was defined to refer the online education practices which incorporate the OERs for teaching designs. It mainly explains creation, use and reuse of OER. Therefore, Open pedagogy and OEP can be considered as similar terms in the educational context [2]. OERs can also be considered as any other online learning materials use for online course development. Most of the present OERs suit with any teaching method and learning design. Teachers will get access to reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute the OER in general case. The teachers should possess a clear understanding of the copyright level of all the OERs that are going to embed in the lesson plan (OEConsortium).

OER enabled technology, becoming the future trend of OER which combines constructivism and openness, letting the students learn by practice creating their artefacts which can be shared with the 5R concept of OER. Teacher evaluated good quality creation can be used for the future development of the courses [3].

In the field of ICT, there are plenty of OERs (Michigen College)  (Valley College) in a different format as MOOC courses, e-books, reading materials, videos, lectures, puzzle game etc. Universities or educational institutes create the OER’s under various funded projects. The challenging task in this project is selecting the most appropriate OER licenced with Created Common Licence based on the learning design of the course. Teachers can be integrated OERs corresponding to the learning requirements (Yee, 2015).  Even the materials contents are matching with the learning outcomes, all of the selected OERs have to be reviewed by a panel of experts to evaluate the quality and correctness of the contents. This project is only intended for using OERs in the format of e-books, online materials, videos, pictures, animations, presentations and quizzes.

Several research studies have proposed the requirement of having a method to rate the OER’s based on different characteristics. Since there’s no centralised system to locate the OER’s educationists find difficulties choosing the most appropriate OERs for their courses.  If there’s a centralised system is available for OERs, enabling the feedback and rating options, OERs might be able to cover the entire education system in the near future (Berger, 2018).

References

  1. Weller, M. et al., 2017. What Can OER Do for Me? Evaluating the Claims for OER.. In: R. S. Jhangiani & R. Biswas-Diener, eds. The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science. London: Open book, p. 67–77.
  2. Cronin, C., 2017. Openness and praxis: exploring the use of open educational practices in higher education. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 18(3).
  3. Wiley, D. & Hilton, J., 2018. Defining OER-Enabled Pedagogy. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 19(4).

 

(Extracted from a submitted assessment of H817: Openness & Innovation in eLearning)