Open Ed - Week 2
The reading this week Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources brought out some good points for me. This is certainly something I'm going to need to read a couple of times to pull out all the useful information for myself and my work. The first point that caught my eye said, "OER projects can expand access to learning for everyone, but most of all for non-traditional groups of students, and thus widen participation in higher education. They can be an efficient way of promoting lifelong learning, both for individuals and for government, and can bridge the gap between non-formal, informal, and formal learning." I hadn't really thought of OER's doing all of that. Of course I knew that an OER is great for expanding dissemination of a resource and/or the information in that resource, but the lifelong learning point hits home to me since that area of research interests me and fits right into an idea I am researching at this moment, problem-based learning. It is great to see how so many pieces of education fit together and make another point better.
With my current employment in a higher education digital library (Utah State University Digital Library), I have strong feelings over the repository idea in higher education and the metadata issues. I see first hand every day the time and expense involved in metadata creation. The Librarians I work with are very insistent on making sure the metadata associated with a digitized object is accurate and expansive. I have my days of disagreement with them though. We are also in the works for creating an institutional wide repository that will hold the research output and teaching output of the entire campus. One area we want to have in this repository is Utah State's Open Courseware so it is saved in it's many renditions. But many universitites are finding it is hard to get buy-in from faculty to deposit educational information in these repositories as well as use the information that is there. So it was great to read the advisement given to higher education institutions to have an "information technology strategy" in place.
The next notable piece I took from this reading has to do with the role of e-learning. Here again, Utah State University is a big player in distance and e-learning initiatives. It was nice to see that the report sees e-learning as relevant and a piece of open educational resources. Of course e-learning and OER's need to be "convenient, effective, affordable, and sustainable and available to every learner and teacher worldwide". My interests involve all of these, but sustainability is an issue that seems to always be mentioned. As defined in the report, sustainability must meet the goals of a project for continuation to occur. As a researcher I feel that definition of sustainability is great, but as an employee who deals with other sides of the sustainability issue, I feel that I focus so much more on the economic side of sustainability. Through all I have read and seen it is evident to me that sustainability models cannot include a monetary dependability. I should read David's sustainability piece (making note of that!).
Lastly I noted to myself the importance of creating and sustaining OER's that are accessible for disabilities, quality, and usefulness. Disability accessibility is very important to me and I feel that it needs to be considered more than it is right now. I also realize that this could be a next step for OER's and OCW's (unless they are already focusing on this and I don't know it!). Quality is another big issue for me. It the resource proves to have not quality for educational purposes, why is it there? That could be a very narrow minded way of thinking about quality, so I would love to hear more on what others think the definition of quality is and how that can be measured.
With my current employment in a higher education digital library (Utah State University Digital Library), I have strong feelings over the repository idea in higher education and the metadata issues. I see first hand every day the time and expense involved in metadata creation. The Librarians I work with are very insistent on making sure the metadata associated with a digitized object is accurate and expansive. I have my days of disagreement with them though. We are also in the works for creating an institutional wide repository that will hold the research output and teaching output of the entire campus. One area we want to have in this repository is Utah State's Open Courseware so it is saved in it's many renditions. But many universitites are finding it is hard to get buy-in from faculty to deposit educational information in these repositories as well as use the information that is there. So it was great to read the advisement given to higher education institutions to have an "information technology strategy" in place.
The next notable piece I took from this reading has to do with the role of e-learning. Here again, Utah State University is a big player in distance and e-learning initiatives. It was nice to see that the report sees e-learning as relevant and a piece of open educational resources. Of course e-learning and OER's need to be "convenient, effective, affordable, and sustainable and available to every learner and teacher worldwide". My interests involve all of these, but sustainability is an issue that seems to always be mentioned. As defined in the report, sustainability must meet the goals of a project for continuation to occur. As a researcher I feel that definition of sustainability is great, but as an employee who deals with other sides of the sustainability issue, I feel that I focus so much more on the economic side of sustainability. Through all I have read and seen it is evident to me that sustainability models cannot include a monetary dependability. I should read David's sustainability piece (making note of that!).
Lastly I noted to myself the importance of creating and sustaining OER's that are accessible for disabilities, quality, and usefulness. Disability accessibility is very important to me and I feel that it needs to be considered more than it is right now. I also realize that this could be a next step for OER's and OCW's (unless they are already focusing on this and I don't know it!). Quality is another big issue for me. It the resource proves to have not quality for educational purposes, why is it there? That could be a very narrow minded way of thinking about quality, so I would love to hear more on what others think the definition of quality is and how that can be measured.
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