Activity Seven - Open Education

Open Education resources (OER) is defined as “teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge”. (William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, n.d.).

Students now have the ability to access any information they want from the internet, however as we have found with some of our units, answers can be very conflicting with those taught within our course materials. Students are provided with a standard procedure manual and a textbook which is recommended for purchase as the core information for Veterinary Nursing. Both of these materials are considered the basis behind everything that is taught. However if you were to search for a dogs heart rate on the internet you would find varying answers which is why we need some of these set guidelines that have been agreed upon by all teaching institutions. This issue of varying answers was very apparent with our animal behaviour unit, where student answers provided on their assessments clashed with current updated studies. I can see this is where it’s very important to be able to direct students to clearly defined open education resource platforms, rather than students randomly searching on the internet and then unfortunately believing everything they read as gospel.

Interestingly since completing this paper I learned that one of our own text books that was developed through the School of Veterinary Nursing has been created into a wikibook. Unfortunately I’m not aware that this resource is currently used in this context, and students are directed to the duplicated moodle based resource. We also have lots of video resources available online through varying portals such as Youtube. Again these are closed resources where access is unlisted and only given in the form of a link provided to the students to view. However once they have this link this can be a reference material that they can access after their studies have been completed, but these links do change from time to time when they are updated so can eventually become redundant.

There seem to be a lot of sustainability considerations around OER and one of the most important aspects is that the information needs to remain current and active otherwise it can fall into a trap of becoming only reference materials. I read an interesting article by David Wiley where he discussed some of the sustainability challenges with OER “Open educational resource projects must find two unique types of sustainability. First, they must find a way to sustain the production and sharing of open educational resources. Second, and of equal importance, they must find a way to sustain the use and reuse of their open educational resources by end users (whether teachers or learners)” (Wiley, 2013). He also went on to discuss the financial issues around funding, making sure these projects continue long term and the importance of making sure that the platforms chosen can be equally used across all hardware and operating systems.

 

Otago Polytechnic has very strong strategies and goals towards OER and I know this is where we will be heading in the future to help further broaden access to learning. There will be some great opportunities to collaborate with other providers throughout New Zealand and around the world and extend the ethos of the lifelong learner.

 

References:

Jelley, R (2013). Open Education Practices: A User Guide for Organisations/OER Literature Review. Retrieved from http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Open_Education_Practices:_A_User_Guide_for_Organisations/OER_Literature_Review#cite_note-PawlowskiBick-4

WikiEducator (2014) Otago Polytechnic. ( 2014, January 14). Retrieved from http://wikieducator.org/Otago_Polytechnic/Home

Wiley, D (2006). On The Sustainability Of Open Education Resources Initiatives In Higher Education. Retrieved from http://opencontent.org/docs/oecd-report-wiley-fall-2006.pdf

 

William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. (n.d.). Open educational resources. Retrieved from

http://www.hewlett.org/programs/education/open-educational-resources