Personal Blogs

OER is reducing the digital divide, and making resources accessible to the larger audience, because these resources are available free of cost, which help in cutting the cost of education, but in my personal opinion, OER cannot completely replace the conventional resources and classrooms. In Pakistan, most of the public schools do not have the accessibility of the basic facilities like books, so we cannot think of using technology for accessing resources, unless providing the basic educational resources to the children. Weak technological infrastructure may also hamper its use. It is good that globally, instructors have the facilities to use these materials, but teachers must be trained to incorporate these resources and bear the additional workload, beside the routine work, to use OER. Also, let the teacher decide, if he/she want to use OER or not. Further, there remains a question on the quality of the available resources. I always wonder why the resources are available free of cost? Is it for the social benefits, or for marketing the organization?. Obviously, no one works for free, so there must be some potential benefits for the organizations, in addition to providing the social benefits. The OER resources on all the areas are unevenly distributed. I tried to search for OER on Islamic teaching methods, but I did not find any.  Also, you may not be able to find updated resources all the time. Culture and ideology of every country has great influence on the content, so this might be a challenge too.

OER has potentially reduced the cost of higher education due to disruptive technology (Anderson and McGreal, 2017). It also supports the concept of lifelong learning, and expand the access to learning for everyone by bridging the gap between non-formal, informal and formal learning, but there are many social, legal, economic and technological barriers attached to the use, produce and share of OER (Hylen, 2007). Many people do not have access to technology to use these resources. Also, if the technology is available, many are misusing these freely available resources. In Pakistan, pirated books are available, printed out of the OER materials. It has now become a business industry to use OER for this purpose, with no check and balance from the government.  Thus, the issue of open content and copyrighted of the material is at the forefront of OER.

OER can be implemented worldwide, but technological infrastructure, particularly in the developing countries, along with awareness and training of teachers on the proper utilization of resources is required to turn this idea into the reality.  Also the role of institution is crucial.

The questions raised in week 10a were, ‘What are learning institutions for?’  and ‘[open learning will] smash the structure of the modern university’. The demand of the conventional classes will remain the same forever. Although open access to resources are providing more access to teachers and learners towards free resources, but OER cannot replace institutions. Challenges like quality assurance, etc remain at forefront.

There must be a global policy for OER. Also, quality must be ensured. In addition, if we want to implement OER worldwide, we must first do the 'resource mapping' and 'technological mapping' of the countries 

Reference

Hylén, J. (2007). Giving knowledge for free. 1st ed. Paris: OECD.

Anderson, T. and McGreal, R. (2017). Disruptive Pedagogies and Technologies in Universities. Educational Technology & Society, [online] 15(4), pp.380-389. Available at: http://web.a.ebscohost.com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=11&sid=1f99fbc3-f1e1-43ca-a95e-e917ff0761e7%40sessionmgr4008&hid=4204 [Accessed 23 Apr. 2017].