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Open Education

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Edited by Winston Ettienne, Friday, 22 Mar 2019, 13:51

 Publish a blog post that describes your experience with open education. Is it just with the OU, or have you studied a MOOC, used open resources, or engaged with open access publications?

As I reflect on the above question I decided to do a little research on Open education, OER and MOOCs before I attempt to give my experience.

WHAT IS OPEN EDUCATION?

Open education is a philosophy about the way people should produce, share, and build on knowledge. The principal tenet of OE is collaboration — a collaboration among institutions, administrators, educators, and students. OER are resources created by educators to serve students. These are meant to be openly accessible, so they can be enhanced and modified. It offers educators a differentiated approach to serve students of diverse needs and preferences.

Proponents of open education believe everyone in the world should have access to high-quality educational experiences and resources and they work to eliminate barriers to this goal. Such barriers might include high monetary costs, outdated or obsolete materials, and legal mechanisms that prevent collaboration among scholars and educators.

What are open educational resources?

Open educational resources (OERs) are learning materials that can be modified and enhanced because of their creators have given others permission to do so. The individuals or organizations that create OERs—which can include materials like presentation slides, podcasts, syllabi, images, lesson plans, lecture videos, maps, worksheets, and even entire textbooks—waive some (if not all) of the copyright associated with their works, typically via legal tools like Creative Commons licenses, so others can freely access, reuse, translate and modify them.

What are MOOCs?

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are online courses accessible to anyone with a computer and access to the Internet. People call these courses "massive" because their enrollment is open to more students than traditional educational institutions might permit—meaning that hundreds (even thousands) of students might participate in a particular MOOC. Today, many colleges and universities have joined organizations committed to providing high-quality education through MOOCs.

So my experience RE: Open Education is very limited based on the above information and it was really since I got enrolled in the MAODE in 2018 I first came across terms such as OE, OER and MOOCs. I do use quite a bit of online resources such as E-books and Google Scholar in my research. I particularly think the openness is very positive and look forward to seeing more openness in the future.


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