The last two weeks of the ONL meetings focused on ‘open education’. I have realized that this term is interchangeably used for distance education or learning in Turkey. I am glad to have differentiated between these two terms. The suggested readings, podcasts, meetings and some further readings helped me reflect on my own practices of ‘openness’. I have never thought opening my courses until now, but now I believe that I should and I can do it for my future courses.

I can say that I am using open resources to some extent that the learning management system that my institution is using allows external users to view schedules of the courses, weekly topics, and suggested readings as well. I myself also share the course materials such as presentations with my students and upload them to the platform called as Edmodo. I create a class on Edmodo and students can easily enroll in my classes with a code when I have created while setting the class. I am not quite sure whether it really fulfills the requirements of open educational resources, but I believe anyone with the class code can enroll and access the materials that I share. That is really nice actually.

Technology can help go open in many aspects and reach much more people, but I believe that it is not the only way of sharing the knowledge with other people. For example, I am a trainer of English Language Teacher Education and can have some intact courses (when the pandemic is over of course) with the people in my neighborhood and give some language classes. This will be for common good and people who do not have the possibility to reach and use technology can also benefit from such an open educational practice. Performing such an open practice can also bring a ‘social justice’ (Maha Bali, plenary talk) as it helps breaks the barriers between people who can reach to the technology and who cannot or in many other aspects such as income, age, gender, profession and so on.

Until this topic, I was not aware that I can license the open resources that I share publicly. This is one of the reasons that has hindered me from creating open resources so far. I thought that only published materials in academic journals, books are subject to licensing, but I realized that a possible research idea or paper before submitting to a prospective journal for publication can be shared online and licensed; and, moreover, this can help prevent ‘academic theft’ that one of the participants mentioned during the plenary talk. As a researcher, I am following researchers or published materials on Researchgate and I was quite surprised by how some people publish the pre-print versions of their work. This seems now a quite nice option for me as well as in turn, it also helps recognition of my studies.

In the article, Knox (2013) presents five critiques of OER movement and also some suggestions to resolve them. To me, the disadvantages of open technologies might be about the reliability of the content presented in those resources. However, another article (Hylén, 2006) clearly illustrates the possible disadvantages of OER and solutions for them. For reliability of the content, a colleague from same expertise can help with the reviewing the content that is shared.

As final remarks, the biggest issue seems to relate to the idea: “The others do not, why should I?”. To change this notion, the article (Richter & McPherson, 2021) can be read to widen the perspectives of open education. Last but not least, the report written by Allen and Seaman (2014) presents some striking facts about open education. One of the interesting findings reported by the authors is that nearly 66% of the participants do not have an awareness of open educational resources. For making education ‘open’ to everyone, maybe it is necessary first to disseminate the theory of open education.

I hope you have enjoyed this topic’s reading!

You can refer to the resources below if you want to dive in more.

References

Allen, E. & Seaman, J. (2014). Opening the Curriculum: Open Educational Resources in U.S. Higher Education. Pearson. Retrieved from http://www.onlinelearningsurvey.com/oer.html.

Bali, M, Cronin, C and Jhangiani, RS. 2020. Framing Open Educational Practices from a Social Justice
Perspective. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2020(1): 10, pp. 1–12. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.565. (suggested citation)

Hylén, J. (2006). Open Educational Resources: Opportunities and Challenges. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/education/ceri/37351085.pdf on 25.03.2021.

Knox, J. (2013). Five critiques of the open educational resources movement, Teaching in Higher Education, 18(8), 821-832, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2013.774354.

Richter, T. & McPherson, M. (2012) Open educational resources: Education for the world?, Distance Education, 33(2), 201-219, DOI: 10.1080/01587919.2012.692068.