Interestingly, in this literacy of open learning promotes strongly the benefits as well as challenges of openness in higher education. It is really encouraging us learning, more focusing not only open educational resources (OERs) freely available, open/closed technologies for the learners and create global wide networking in courses. Openness certainly create opportunity to learn resources/courses available online freely for example our ONL211 course for practice and share its contents. At the same time, majority of the Universities or higher educational institutions are not intending to share resources as well as course because of several limitations including extensive course fee paid by the students for the entire course duration/expensive/unaffordable for other countries due to cost, networking in courses.
In my own experience, some of the peer-review online journals/e-books of research as well as openly share (open access) research data, solid information available online for e-learning to improve knowledge/technology not only enhance education but also training platform for new leaners. Moreover, the open access e-journals definitely promotes the work of researchers and also practitioners in global wide for knowledge sharing.
There is a lot more resources i.e Wikipedia, Google search engine & others available to practice/share structured information without affecting the copy right of resources and also share in a responsible way within a closure community. Yes, I strongly agree that claim which knowledge has to be considered for a common good, especially the content sharing has to be in a responsible way without violating their intellectual property (IP) and also open of course by limitation-free, low cost education. Currently, due to technological advancement plenty of open licensed resources available online forum especially/ these databases are very good starting point to find out a wide variety of open access resources from e-books/open textbook (library)/research journals, teaching online materials within campus allows only the registered user. In addition, OER materials are available for teaching, learning and research purses in any medium released under open license which permits free of cost/allow access, make use, adaption, re-distribution, content sharing, encourage self-guidance of exploration and also no limited restrictions.
Advantages of open access technologies includes teaching/learning programmes, there is a line of clear distinguish how much they can share the content to individual or groups within the learners institutions or collaborating/ networking groups in global wide. Eventfully, our ONL211 provides effectively communication, global networking via learning, sharing content through blog posting (digital content, text, data, software, audio/video, multimedia, novels, music and movies), discuss our ideas by using virtual technologies. Similarly, some of the open access online journals/e-books creates more readers, potential collaborators, quickly get higher citation of their work/recognition of own institutions, improved access to all the researchers freely without any cost. Generally, it refers resources which are freely available for view, refer and use of content with poor quality than the subscripted resources with restriction of access.
Disadvantages of OER, difficulty in use, compatibility issues, often protected by license, cost involved, new environment, required training, distraction, reliability issue, delay due to new features, cyber-attack/hacking, virus/cheating that severely affect learners (Weller, 2014).
I personally feel that my own experience via this ONL211 learning/journey is influencing greater experience for my online digital literacy (Bates, 2015), get to know people global wide/familiarize the new technological tools for new learning platform software apart from Zoom networking in courses. Fascinatingly, this “Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) allow access of several participants massively at the same without much restriction of access of course, video lectures and also online tests or the learning content MOOC created by the Universities as well as educational higher institutions (Weller and Anderson, 2013).
References:
Weller, M. (2014). Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory. London: Ubiquity Press.
(If you can, try to read all of this excellent overview of the whole question of openness but if you can’t, focus on Chapter 4, Open Educational Resources, and Chapter 5, MOOCs.).
Bates, T. (2015). Teaching in a Digital Age: Guidelines for Teaching and Learning.
(This is probably the best guide there is today to teaching in a digital context. Worth reading the whole book but for this unit you can focus on Chapter 10, Trends in open education.)
Dos Santos, A., Punie, Y., Munoz, J. (2016). Opening up education. A support framework for higher education institutions. European Commission JRC Science for Policy Report.
(Excellent review of open education in Europe today.
Weller, M., & Anderson, T. (2013). Digital resilience in higher education. European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning, 16(1), 53.
