My first impression to ‘Open Education’ was rather sceptical, perhaps due to my personal perception of the word ‘Open Education’. Copy right issue and non-authorised sharing of materials were some of the past experiences in open education for me. However this time, I would like to learn more what ‘Open Education’ really means.
While reading the references and the webinar prepared by Alastair and Kiru, I came to reflect about what educators’ role and responsibilities in the open education context. Educators’ responsibility traditionally covers from creating educational resources (e.g. hard-material like textbook & soft-material like curriculum design and activities) to delivering them to learners in a private space. However, open education aims to share ‘educational resources’ among educators and learners. It makes me think how I can re-define or evolve the role and responsibility of educators in open education, and how I can contribute to the community more meaningfully as educator.
From the discussion during my PBL 11 meetings, I learnt that we can provide constructive feedback to each other and continuously can improve ourselves in developing the educational resources. And we can be agreeable on how we adopt the educational resources originally created by others. To me, this is a matter of culture. Culture in the community, we can mutually agree to respect the copy right and ethics in accessing to others’ work.
Besides, I appreciate that this opportunity to understand open education made me realise that I have encourage my students co-create open resources. A wonderful written work created by one of my students actually inspired me that I could use that piece as a model for future students. I asked that student for a permission to share it open (e.g. for any potential students), and he happily agreed to that. In this activity, my student became a co-creator of open educational resources. The unique learning point from this experience was that learners, not only educators can contribute to sharing educational resources. More importantly, the student who was invited to share his works seemed to improve in his writing in further submissions after the experience of sharing the work. I may speculate that he self-motivated in the performance for potential opportunities of sharing his work again. In consequence of sharing the work, the contributing learners can also get benefited by co-creation of open resources in the education context.
This approach can be applied to the entire class, but I am, at the same time being cautious of unnecessary stress of sharing the works could be seen from some students. After all, open education requires a great deal of courage!
