It was fair to say that most of the people in my PBL group were not familiar with OER and its uses prior to this week. During the first meeting, we started out with really basic questions. What is OER? What constitutes OER? How is OER used in the classroom, and how do they benefit students? How do they compromise or value-add to universities’ programmes and prestige? What legal dimensions do we need to be aware of?
By the end, I reckon we are all convinced to incorporate OERs into our teaching practice a little more.
Open sharing in my own teaching and learning
As a recent university graduate, I was not particularly aware of any OERs used in our curriculum. The vast amount of library resources we had access to were already included in our university fees, so it was easy to take it for granted.
I only started becoming concerned about student access to educational resources after I became a teaching assistant and was looking for opportunities to up skill professionally. That was when I started becoming acutely aware of the (almost ridiculously) high price wall deterring access to education.
As I have never been formally trained in teaching, I unknowingly relied on OERs and its many variations to inform and plan my lessons. So while I have been exposed to the resources, I have only heard of the term “OER” right here in ONL.
Just as it is with picking up a new skill, learning and approaching a new resource takes time and effort. During our group discussions, we covered a few considerations that we had with regards to integrating OERs into our classrooms. The padlet below is our little effort in simplifying the steps to understanding aspects of OER such as its legality, the organisational support required, and the quality assessment process. At the end of the day, we want OERs to be enhancing our teaching practice rather than hindering it.
Two key considerations I personally wish to highlight:
How far do OERs level the access to education?
Over the past year or so, I started getting acquainted with using Creative Commons and Wikimedia Commons for image search as well as teaching databases for inspiration for classroom activities. Personally, I also got acquainted with MOOC (Massive Online Open Courses) platforms like Coursera and EdX for personal upskilling. Speaking from the point of view of a young person in their early career – not yet financially stable but still keen on learning and upgrading myself – I have personally benefited from the convenience and little to no cost at which such variety of resources are made available to me.
However, OERs cannot be seen as the “be all and end all” solution to unequal access to education. As they are most easily shared through the internet, we have to consider the limitations of the great digital divide. The problem of unequal education access in my country, Singapore, was not in the spotlight until the pandemic hit. As schools moved to remote learning, the non-ownership and limited access to digital learning devices and a stable internet connection of poorer students became a huge hindrance their education.
Revisiting the role of an educator
A question that came up during discussion was, “If there are already so many high quality teaching and learning resources online, then would the role of the educator be diminished?”
Indeed, it seems that the common understanding of the role of an educator in higher education is that person not only delivers lesson content, but also creates it. However, who is to say that OERs are “one-size-fits-all”s? The student profile, local relevancy, general interests and preferences, and many more defining characteristics of each class is unique. A certain type of lesson content and teaching method that is successful in someone else’s class might not necessarily work in mine – or, it does not work as well as expected. It is through trial-and-error and the little tweaks made to the curriculum each year that makes us better educators, not simply machines copy-and-pasting the same formula over and over.
