The following blog post responds to Livia Alexander’s post regarding Open & Pedagogy and Resources
Hello Livia! I had a great time reading your blog post – it does a great job highlighting Open Pedagogy, OER’s, and the Creative Commons License. It is nice to hear about your recent class where the teacher utilized open resources rather than requiring students to purchase textbooks or extra resources. I completely understand that reading textbooks can feel very repetitive, which is why having exposure to a wide variety of resources (i.e., podcasts, videos, or journals) can feel so much more engaging and dynamic. Moreover, your points about the challenges OER faced, in particular digital access, quality control, and language barriers is very important to understand. To overcome these challenges it is crucial that proper planning is done before the deployment of any resource. For better digital access, developers should ensure that resources are available offline (i.e., by making resources downloadable), so that the resources don’t depend on internet connections. For quality control, developers should establish peer review networks so the OER community members could test the resources to ensure everything is functionally correct. Finally, for the challenge of language barriers, developers should utilize machine translation tools (i..e, adapt AI ) to ensure that the resources can be easily accessed in a variety of different languages.
All the best,
Sai