Open education resources
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I increasingly fear that the open educational resources movement is being used as a way of perpetuating inequalities in education while purporting to be democratic. Some components of OERs also smack of hypocrisy, elitism and cultural imperialism (the bad), as well as failure to apply best practices in teaching and learning (the ugly). Despite my support for the idea of sharing in education (the good), these concerns have been gnawing away at me for some time, so after 42 years of working in open learning, I feel it’s time to provide a critique of the open educational resources ‘movement’. This is prompted by several recent developments, such as the following publications and events:
OERs: the good, the bad and the ugly
OER Handbook for Educators 1.0
From WikiEducator In this handbook Welcome to the world of Open Educational Resources (OER). This handbook is designed to help educators find, use, develop and share OER to enhance their effectiveness online and in the classroom. Although no prior knowledge of OER [1] is required, some experience using a computer and browsing the Internet will be helpful.We happened to mention Michael Sandel last week, and then I came across this… Harvard University and WGBH Boston have posted online Sandel’s very popular course, “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?” How popular is it?
Open Culture
Smarthistory: a multimedia web-book about art and art history
Online textbook for post-secondary art history; great example by Feb 4
FlexBooks
California initiative for free K-12 digital textbooks by Feb 4