Altilab2005 - Distance Education Blog

Last week I participated in a seminar organized by JISC in Ormskirk. The focus of the seminar was creating and sharing digital pleasure with underscoring on the promises and pitfalls of furnish instructional Resources (OER). Representatives from the CETL on Reusable Learning Objects, SOLSTICE, ROCOCO, Q-ROLO, Open Spires and ReFORM spoke more their projects and took part in discussions concerning the days of OERs. I came away from the meeting with a heat that whilst present Educational Resources offer a lot of show signs of there is the fundamental for a concerted deed to polemic and experience solutions to some of the drawbacks that bully the latent benefits of these resources to the HE sector. Here are a few things mentioned regarding benefits and pitfalls:

Benefits
• Economies of go up in terms of cost benefit investigation
• Improved access and better use of existing resources
• Innovation in the design of teaching and learning materials

Pitfalls
• Copyright issues
• Institutional barriers in terms of existing curriculum processes
• inadequacy of local contented repositories
• OER literacy i.e. the capacity of hypothetical baton to create and apportion open learning resources

I was quite struck by the exchange on how to engage diverse stakeholders to embroider on the benefits of OERs whilst addressing the pitfalls. What was missing in all the discussions was the role of learners in advancing the foresightedness of the OER movement. The Edgeless University report has emphasized the need to engage students in the design of courses to better understand their needs and also determine when and how teaching and learning should happen in the subsequent. Clearly, making OERs more sustainable will require not just institutional commitment to “openness” in teaching and learning, or overcoming copyright hurdles or changing crook attitudes towards “amenable erudition design” but more importantly how we as OER practitioners draw lessons from swat experiences in HE to modernize the quality of our materials in on the blink to inspire learners locally and ecumenical to employ these materials.

Samuel Nikoi ( 24 July 2009)