Open Educational Recourses

It is true that we are entering a world in which we will have to acquire new knowledge and skills on an almost continuous basis, as the world is changing at a rapid speed. To address the problem of growing global demand for lifelong education, the Open Educational Resources (OER) Movement was put forth in 2001.

Throughout this course I learned a lot about the educational potential of the Internet as a global platform that has vastly expanded access to both formal and informal educational materials. The so-called Web 2.0 has blurred the line between producers and consumers supporting multiple modes of learning. The article titled “Open education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0” by John Brown and Richard Adler, was a new revelation for me. I got familiar with the idea of OER and its role in the modern world. I think, this new movement is a very necessary development for providing lifelong learning opportunities, as it provides open access to undergraduate and graduate level materials and modules for more than 1,700 courses.

One significant feature of the Internet is fostering social learning which focuses not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning. I agree that knowledge is not a kind of substance transferred from teachers to learners, but it is the understanding of content which is socially constructed. My teaching experience has taught me that one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it to others.

Another aspect of social learning is the opportunity not only to learn about the subject matter, but also to learn to be a full participant in the field. The traditional Cartesian educational system can very well characterize the Armenian educational system where students spend years learning about a subject and only after receiving this explicit knowledge they start getting the tacit knowledge of how to be a professional in a field. In contrast, the open source communities follow John Dewey’s perspective of “productive enquiry” which views learning as a process of seeking the knowledge when it is needed to carry out a particular task.

Although these extended connections were not developed to serve educational purposes, there are a number of examples of study groups which have been created to help students benefit from social learning. Such examples are the Terra Incognita project, the Harvard Law School course called “CyberOne: Law in the Court of public Opinion”, the Digital StudyHall, and others. The role that I see in these types of informal learning is that they can coexist with and extend traditional education. Some other examples of e-science and e-humanities communities, such as Faulkes Telescope project, Hands-on-Universe project, or Bugscope project, enhance the social leaning which creates a participatory architecture where participants learn about learning.

I strongly support the new demand-pull approach, in contrast to the supply-push approach, as the former provides students with access to rich learning communities built around a practice where understanding is formed through active, passion-based learning, and fosters lifelong learning that extends beyond formal schooling. As the article concludes, ‘this is a major step toward creating a 21^st-century global culture of learning to meet the demands of our constantly changing world.’

In the podcast about OER, Cable Green and Joel Smith speak about the challenges of access, impact, and sustainability, and how to deal with these challenges. They mention that the ultimate goal of OER is to increase the number of educated people and increase the quality of education they are getting. To meet the challenges of this movement, it was decided that having open licensed content is not enough; there should be data analytics to collect assessment data for the improvement of the quality of OER. This can also guarantee the accuracy, the completeness and the context of the content which is very important for the individual learner. OER needs to provide an instructional strategy, interactive exercises, and comprehension checks to provide effective instruction. High quality open content can be achieved if it is analyzed and revised on a regular basis, if it is useful and appropriate, and if it is shared, as sharing can bring better things; there is always someone outside who will find the gaps and fix them. First of all, we, educators should be responsible for providing this quality.