scholarly journals User Education and File Standards Best Options to Ensure Open Educational Resources are Truly Open

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 236-237
Author(s):  
Jordan Patterson

A Review of: Ovadia, S. (2019). Addressing the technical challenges of open educational resources. portal: Libraries and the Academy, 19(1), 79-93. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2019.0005 Abstract Objective – To describe common technical challenges of open educational resources (OERs) and recommend solutions. Design – Descriptive study. Setting – Online open educational resources in higher education. Subjects – Open educational resources. Methods – Drawing from the literature and his own experiences, the author explains the necessity of accepted standards of “openness” and describes the many ways OERs fail to meet these standards. The author also describes common technical challenges that impede openness, then proposes solutions to address these challenges. Main Results – Technical limitations often prohibit OERs from being truly open. Providers can design their resources to encourage reuse, redistribution, revision, and remixing. Three strategies for addressing technical challenges in OERs are user education, open file standards, and using Git to facilitate distributed version control. Conclusion – Git is a compelling option for distributed version control, but entails its own technical challenges. User education and established open file standards are the best strategies to ensure that OERs are open in both a legal and a technical sense. The article concludes with the author’s opinions about how OER directors may most realistically implement these solutions.

Author(s):  
Andy Lane

This chapter examines the role that open educational resources might play in widening participation in higher education. It begins by highlighting the perceived importance of widening participation in higher education throughout the world and how that is defined, followed by the role that openness plays more generally in higher education, and then discusses the many ways in which open educational resources may help in opening up higher education by widening the audiences for them. It goes on to set out a conceptual framework for analysing both widening participation activities and open educational resources. It concludes that openness, as exemplified by open educational resources, is beginning to influence educational opportunities around the world, but that care is needed in setting out the contexts in which such activity is taking place.


2018 ◽  
Vol 325 ◽  
pp. 479-490
Author(s):  
Roza Dumbraveanu

Higher Education Institutions (HEI) are facing a number of problems during the last decades: the need to update the curricula to make it compatible with the similar ones from other national and European universities; demand to update the content and the pedagogical approach due to knowledge, technological and research development. Open Educational Resources (OER) might be a sound strategy for institutions to meet these challenges. At the same time OER are themselves one of the challenges that the teachers are faced with. OER could be implemented in courses in different ways, depending on the types of OER and the educational philosophy adopted by the teachers. The paper describes some challenges for implementing Open Educational Resources by teachers in Higher Education in Moldova: the level of awareness on availability and usage of OER; fair use matters; quality assurance of resources; pedagogical approaches for implementing OER into teaching and learning. The paper also grasps the issues of the digital divide that emerge when investigating these challenges. The judgment is based on the literature analysis and on the author’s teaching experience within courses for initial and continuous professional teachers’ training.


2017 ◽  
Vol 08 (06) ◽  
pp. 813-828
Author(s):  
Patrícia Lupion Torres ◽  
Danielle Cristine Boaron ◽  
Raquel Pasternak Glitz Kowalski

Author(s):  
Rafaela Blanca Silva-López ◽  
Ricardo Marcelín Jiménez ◽  
Iris Iddaly Méndez Gurrola ◽  
Hugo Pablo Leyva

Author(s):  
Amit Kumar Deval

The higher education sector is being influenced by many factors, and a paradigm shift from conventional learning to virtual learning can easily be observed. MOOCs are an innovative initiative in promoting and imparting virtual learning to the end users that are restricted to pursue their higher education due to time, space, and money constraints. Open educational resources are an integral part of MOOCs, and to sustain the viability of MOOCs, quality open educational resources are a need of the hour. Issues related to MOOCs and open educational resources are being taken up by various governmental and non-governmental organizations in accelerating the e-learning concepts among their citizens and to fill up the gaps, if any, to avoid digital divide between the students of regular and open universities. India, being a developing country, needs to put more efforts into promoting the concepts of MOOCs and to popularizing the concepts. In this regard, the Government of India has introduced various platforms for open educational resources for enhancing and supporting MOOCs.


Author(s):  
Bethanie L. Hansen

This chapter introduces the many resources that come together to create the online music appreciation course curriculum. Because curriculum is the main content of the course, judiciously selecting from among the many options available to determine suitable content is essential. Readers will learn about limit-setting and curriculum components. Additionally, guidance for choosing a textbook and a review of major textbooks in print is provided, as well as a discussion of open educational resources (OERs) and sample resources. Some discussion is included about creating and providing instructor video lectures. The chapter ends with a brief summary of important points and an infographic designed to visually highlight the qualities and benefits of four major types of curriculum content.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-358
Author(s):  
Reneta P. Barneva ◽  
Valentin E. Brimkov ◽  
Federico Gelsomini ◽  
Kamen Kanev ◽  
Lisa Walters

Open educational resources (OER) are educational materials with an open license so that they can be freely copied, modified, and reused. While the rising cost of textbooks is a concern in higher education, over 50% of the surveyed educators stated that they are unaware of the OER and how they could replace the traditional textbooks. In addition, not many instructors understand the Creative Commons licenses under which OER can be used. In this work, we consider the types of OER and outline the sources of OER for business courses. We describe our experience of using such resources for innovative business courses and discuss the choices we made and the lessons learned. Finally, we share the results of surveys about OER we conducted with students and reflect on them.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document