2007年11月14日 星期三

Week 8: Oct. 15th Open Educational Resources (OER)

This week, we talked a lot about what can be shared in Education? Our answers to this question including materials, reports, confidence and skills, tools and codes, ideas for future dreams, resources, expertise advisement. We also show sites we are interested in with our classmates to share open educational resources. In this process, we need to combine what we learned from the reading this week with experiences in researching open educational resources to think about why it is important to education. Geser, Guntram’s paper on Open educational Practices and Resources: OLCOS Roadmap 2012 provides an excited, comprehensive, and powerful message of the state of this field.

“The point of view of the publishers concentrates on the fact that the current educational framework (policy, curricula, classroom settings, assessment and certification schemes, etc.) leaves little rooms for the educational institutions, teachers and learners themselves to create and share teaching and learning content. For example, the European eLearning Industry Group (eLIG) writes: ‘Educators have long been presented by some as substitutes for publishers…’ ”I think it is a creative thinking and meaningful examination of current educational framework. However, I always heard teachers from K-12 in Taiwan complaining that they don’t have time to create materials or there is no the best way to gather open educational resources for their students. They thought that maybe there are so many open educational resources that they don’t know where to start. They hoped there comes a platform that combine and elaborate those OER very well. I know it is not the right time to consider this because OER is still blooming. But I still expect an organization could jump up and take care of this.

There is another interesting point about OCOL’s expectations. “OCOL expect that by 2012 a stronger shift towards e-learning will take place that will build on tools and services for collaboratively creating and sharing content while also drawing on many larger and smaller publicly funded educational and other e-content repositories, including offerings of private-public partnerships. It also expects the Creative Commons Licenses to become the leading standard for licensing creative works other than software. This will help greatly in taming the proliferation of open content licenses since the second half of the 1990s. From the many existing open Publication License, and so forth – only a few maybe used further by smaller groups of authors.” (http://support.creativecommons.org/videos)
Except for a traditional idea of copyright- all rights reserved, the Creative Comments Organization provides us a new idea- some rights reserved. With this new idea, we can facilitate our sharing, reusing, and remixing our publication and creation with a layer of reasonable copyright. When your intention shifts to equalizing the evaluation of innovation and protection, you may achieve your worthwhile goals in much more sharing but without too much regulation by adopting creative control- some rights reserved. I think it is a valuable concept but I doubt that how many people can take this, and how does “some rights reserved” work after all. There must come some legal issue following the idea of “some rights reserved” because the boundary becomes very vague. Only when people have an agreement on this new idea may they become comfortable and have trust in each other.


Following paragraphs are some collection from Roadmap 2012 www.olcos.org.
I hope it will help someone who is interested in OER.

Open e-Learning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS)

“OER is understood to comprise content for teaching and learning, software-based tools and services, and licenses that allow for open development and re-use of content, tools and services. Besides, OER is an important element of policies that leverage education and lifelong learning for the knowledge economy and society.”

“OLCOS emphasizes that it is crucial to promote innovation and change in educational practices.” In addition, it also warns that “delivering OER to the still dominant model of teacher centered knowledge transfer will have little effect on equipping teachers, students and workers with the competences, knowledge and skills to participate successfully in the knowledge economy and society.”

OLCOS stresses “the need to foster open practices of teaching and learning that are informed by a competency-based educational framework, shift towards such practices will only happen in the longer term in a step-by-step process, which will require targeted and sustained efforts by educational leaders at all levels.”

From the OLCOS’s points of views, there are some critical inhibitors to OER. First, “business models in OER will remain tricky. The right mix of income streams must be found, and there will be growing competition for scarce funding resources.” Second, “in order to see researchers and educators excel in OER, academic and educational institutions will need to implement appropriate mechanisms of recognition and reward.” Third, “regarding educational repositories at present there exists little experience in how to effectively support communities of practice, which is of critical importance if OER initiatives want to grow based on user contributions.”

But there are still some potential enablers to OER. “The urgency of the lifelong learning agenda in Europe and particularly welcome.” Besides, “whereas current OER initiatives focus mainly on providing access to static course material, a new generation of easy-to-use Web-based tools and services provides opportunities to offer beyond makes OER initiatives targeted at driving participation potentially more effective OER.” Last but not least, “for authors and institutions who wish to provide OER while retaining some copyrights, the set of Creative Commons licenses allows for doing so in an internationally standardized way.”

They concludes that“at the heart of the movement toward Open Educational Resources is the simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the Worldwide Web in particular provide an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and re-use knowledge. OER are the parts of that knowledge that comprise the fundamental components of education –
content and tools for teaching, learning and research.”

1 則留言:

Chris 提到...

I also enjoyed the OLCOS Roadmap. It was a progressive but realistic take on where education IS going. After being in this class there is no doubt that collaborative learning, with web 2.0 as the synthesizing tool, is a reality. It is therefore the responsibility of those who will have to facilitate these methodologies and tools to get their hands on them now. I understand the reluctance of bucking the "tried and true" but, as stated in class, this is not how Millennials learn. In addition, many of these tools are easy to use and the learners build much of the content themselves through problem based learning, making the instructor into a facilitator. Even the article states that it is not learning that has changed but the tools by which we learn. If the web is the best tool shouldn't we be using it?

You picked out some good highlights from the article. It reminded me how much I liked it addressed lifelong learning. It is definitely true in today’s workforce, even in stabile environments, learning is a lifetime venture. This is both formal and informal instruction and the web is the perfect medium to deliver learning content to busy adults.