Learning Reflection on Session 2

2^nd Learning Reflection #OCL4Ed

The second session gives us more insight on what constitutes an open educational resource? My favourite definition of OER is: “Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others (Creative Commons[3]).”

Dr. Wiley in his video defines “Openness” as a matter of:

• Price (i.e. having free access and free copyright permissions) and
• Permission (i.e. the 4 R’: Reuse, Revise, Remix and Redistribute)

The video on the ownership of ideas in a digital world based on Eben Moglen and Lawrence Lessig presentations makes me realize the extent of oversight on the importance of free and open sharing. Eben Moglen in his session explains on how sharing has become “theft” with the question being that of “why” and “who”. I find his statement “the era of precedence for life is over” very thought-provoking and agree that today control of ownership needs to sit with the producer to decide on how exactly their work is used.

Lawrence Lessig talks more about openness from the perspective of fair-use to enable/create a creative culture to build on commercial work and sharing. The work/actions undertaken by the two big companies (Disney and Star Wars/Lucas) comes as a shock to say the very least as to how conveniently they have exploited resources in the public domain. From that I would conclude that “Openness” is a commitment to values where we need to respect and acknowledge the work done by a creator to ensure that their work could be shared freely using “fair use” strategy. 

The latter half talks about Barriers and Opportunities to OER in institutions. Particularly for us; the greatest barrier we have is that of lack of awareness of OER and its benefits. And as such there is huge opportunity for the institution to adopt OER at an institutional level by means of policy and institutional practices. Even so, incentive could be given to staff to utilize OER in their courses and also create content and distribute their work under open license.

The #Open Textbook Tweet book summarises the session well. My 2 favorite tweets that defines my experience of this session is: #76 “As educators, our goals should be to do whatever we can to make educational opportunities available and affordable to every student we can."  And #112 “There is a great future for open education resources. We need to embrace the concept that education is a fundamental right for all of us”.