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Munir Moosa Sadruddin

Activity 4: Identifying priorities for research

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Language: Knowledge sharing and openness in education are the key features of internationalization of education. However, there is a number of cultural barriers such as language, which funding organization must consider to widening accessibility and maximizing learners’ participation (Stacey, 2007). Most of the open education resources such as books and research papers are not translated in languages used in the third world countries such as Urdu and Hindi. Thus, language gap is widening gaps in learners’ access to online resources (Cobo, 2013).If funding organization invest in translating books and other resources in most of the languages, it will expand the network of learning

 

Copyright: Most of the Open Educational Resources are copyrighted under Creative Commons. However, still, rise in pirated and plagiarized content highlight loophole in the copyright laws (Pena, n.d.; Prasad and Rao, n.d.). It is significantly affecting the accessibility of quality content. Funding organization must provide awareness and ensure copyright of resources from multiple sources. Further copyrighted laws of each country should also be taken in a loop.

Cost:  According to Miao, Mishra and McGreal “OER development can take different routes, such as creation, adoption, adaptation and curation” (2016, p.5). All these require the cost. There are three types of cost which mainly affect OER 1. For producer: the cost of a server, where OER is kept; 2. For the author: the cost of publication; 3. For institutes, learners and practitioners: cost to adoption, adaptation, and access quality and updated content. In order to provide support to all of these, the financial organization must adopt a model, which can overcome cost barriers for all the stakeholders.

 

 References

Miao, F., Mishra, S. and McGreal, R. (2016). Open Educational Resources: Policy, Costs and Transformation. UNESCO and Commonwealth of Learning.

Prasad, R. and Rao, J. (n.d.). OERs: Issues and Challenges of Copyrights, Licensing and Access. [online] Available at: http://oasis.col.org/bitstream/handle/11599/2634/PDF?sequence=4&isAllowed=y [Accessed 23 Mar. 2018].

Pena, H. (n.d.). Higher Education: The Success and Challenges in Open Education Resources (OER). [online] Available at: http://eprints.rclis.org/13743/1/pena.pdf.Cobo, C. (2013). Exploration of Open Educational Resources in Non-English Speaking Communities. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, [online] 14(2). Available at: http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1493/2482 [Accessed 23 Mar. 2018].

Stacey, P. (2007). Open educational resources in a global context. First Monday, [online] 12(4). Available at: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1769/1649 [Accessed 23 Mar. 2018].


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