Blogging from A to Z Challenge: O is for… (#AtoZChallenge)
Welcome to my April 2023 Great and Powerful Blogging from A to Z Challenge!
I’ve revealed my theme (My life in first drafts), but this year, instead of pretending there were ever plans, I am unashamedly blogging my theme letters on the fly. So, here goes nothing!
So, without further ado, O is for Open Education.
So, my passion at my job (as an instructional designer in eLearning) is Open Education. What is Open Education? Well, let me tell you a bit about it.
According to Tony Bates and others, Open Education is
-
education for all: free or very low cost school, college or university education available to everyone within a particular jurisdiction, usually funded primarily through the state;
-
open access to programs that lead to full, recognised qualifications. These are offered by national open universities or more recently by the OERu;
-
open access to courses or programs that are not for formal credit, although it may be possible to acquire badges or certificates for successful completion. MOOCs are a good example;
-
open educational resources that instructors or learners can use [and adapt] for free. MIT’s OpenCourseware, which provides free online downloads of MIT’s video recorded lectures and support material, is one example;
-
open textbooks, online textbooks that are free for students to use;
-
open research, whereby research papers are made available online for free downloading;
-
open data, that is, data open to anyone to use, reuse, and redistribute, subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share.
-
open access to scholarly work available for free online, typically through open access journals
And here are a couple of PDF documents my recently dismissed (for no cause and which we are still really really upset about) Director and I created for my institution:
I have been working in Open Education for about 5 years. I was fortunate to have gotten on board as a project manager for a project working with 5 faculty members who created open education resources for their courses, and as I did that work, I also ran a survey to find out what others are doing, created some workshops, ran a conversation cafe, and did a lot of other work – all off the side of my desk as Open Education is not currently technically part of my job.
I am passionate about Open Ed because it supports students. Education is so expensive these days, it just seems we should be providing cost savings and one of the easiest ways to do that is by providing students with course resources that don’t cost them money – and Open Educational Resources (OER) are one way to do that. OER are Open textbooks, and other materials that are freely available online and are often available for faculty to not only adopt, but also to adapt and revise and mix with other OER – in other words to customize to their specific courses and context.
Oh, I could talk all day about Open Education, and I often do at work with whoever will listen! It does feel good to talk about something I feel so happy to work on in my present day life. Something that, if I am allowed to continue to work on it in a more full-time capacity, will keep me at my job until I am ready to retire.
Here are some more links to the work we have done at my institution. There is more to come, and I am hoping this work becomes the main part of my job, but we will see…
Thanks for visiting my 2023 A to Z Challenge – Letter O. You can find links to more blogs participating in this challenge at Letter A, A to Z 2023 Challenge Master List (Google Docs).
Guess I’m kind of a rebel too…although I do like using the “official” letters…
Posted on April 18, 2023, in A to Z Challenge, photography, Photos I took, Writing. Bookmark the permalink. Leave a comment.
Leave a comment
Comments 0