“Open provision of
educational resources, enabled by information and communication technologies,
for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for non-commercial
purposes”- UNESCO
“Open Education Resources
(OER) are teaching and learning materials freely available for everyone to use,
whether you are a teacher or a learner. This includes full courses, modules,
syllabi, lectures, homework assignments, quizzes, lab activities, pedagogical
materials, games, simulations, and many more resources contained in digital
media collections from around the world.” –OER commons
The free sharing of teaching and learning materials that is
now possible because of advances in digital technology also has a number of
challenges. I am looking at these
challenges through the lens of medical education.
1) Accessibility
of Open Learning Resources
Hatakka described a number of barriers for the reuse of OER
in developing countries including finding suitable material and having
difficulty accessing material because of lack of technical resources
(computers, bandwidth, internet access) (1) The multitude of resources in many different
places can make it difficult to know where to look for resources in developed countries
as well. Increasingly there are repositories
of OER for a particular discipline. For
example in medicine, one could go to Med Ed portal or to African Health OER to
look for teaching materials. The lack of
technical resources is more challenging as it relates to resources and
poverty. Technology however continues to
advance and mobile phone technology may offer additional options for accessing
information.
2) Adaptation
of Open Learning Resources
Learning resources often need to be adapted because of
language, cultural or situational context, difficulty level or context. Questions that arise include:
Can the learning resource be adapted? This question includes whether the creator
given permission for adaptation through a mechanism such as Creative Commons
licensing. Creative Commons is used in
Med Ed Portal to allow for free adaptation of resources while acknowledging the
original creator. This question also
refers to whether the technology and the expertise are available to modify a
resource. For example it may be
difficult to modify a video while it would be easy to modify a Power Point
presentation.
What is the learning value adapting a learning resource? Learning resources are often adapted by
teachers to better meet the needs of their students. Adapting a resource may also be a learning
experience for the teacher or the student. As Leinonen et al described in the
Wikiversity paper, focusing on building a wiki, adapting and changing content
is itself a learning experience. Students
learn when they create or modify learning resources.
3) Effectiveness
of Open Learning Resources
Much still needs to be learned about what makes a learning
resource effective. McGill et al
(page 28) provided a nice mindmap from the National Symposium of Learning Resources Repositories
to begin to think about measuring effectiveness beyond “number of downloads”. These include measures such as satisfaction, quality, benchmarking, cultural change as well downloads, referencing and stories. As with many things that are worth
evaluating, it won’t be easy.
References:
1) Albright,
P. (2005) UNESCO (IIEP): Final forum report. 2008-09-01 http://learn.creativecommons.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/oerforumfinalreport.pdf
2) Hatakka,
M. (2009), ‘Build it and they will come? – Inhibiting factors for reuse of open
content in developing countries’, in EJISDC - The Electronic Journal of
Information Systems in Developing Countries, Vol. 37, n. 5, pp. 1-16 http://www.ejisdc.org/ojs2/index.php/ejisdc/article/view/545/279
3) Leinonen,
T., Vadén, T. and Suoranta, J. (2009) 'Learning in and with an open wiki
project: Wikiversity’s potential in global capacity building' First Monday,
Volume 14, Number 2 - 2 February 2009 http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2252/2093
4) McGill,
L, Currier, S, Duncan, C and Douglas, P (2008)
Good Intentions: Improving the Evidence Base in Support of Sharing
Learning Materials. http://repository.jisc.ac.uk/265/
Relevant Websites:
http://www.oercommons.org/http://www.oerafrica.org/healthoer/Home/ConnectwithColleagues/tabid/1868/Default.aspx
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