For my final reflection for EDCI 339, I chose to consider the Ed Tech trend Open Educational Resources or OER’s. In this reflection, I will define OER’s, consider how they connect to the Universal Design for Learning Guidelines, reflect on my use of OER’s in the past, present and future.
I chose to research OER’s for my Ed Tech trend because it took me the whole course to understand what they are and to be honest I still have some questions. In chapter 17 of the book Open at the Margins, Catherine Cronin references the Open Education Consortium, now renamed as Open Education Global, for the definition of OER’s. The OEC defines OER’s as “resources, tools and practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve educational access and effectiveness worldwide” (Cronin, 2020). It is my understanding that OER’s seek to provide anyone who wants to learn anything with a free way to do exactly that. OER’s also encourage learners to add to the resource, change it and interact with it and other interested learners as much as possible which is what makes them so unique.
I am going into my 5th year of full-time teaching so I am no stranger when it comes to the UDL guidelines; however, I am amazed each time I am asked to go back and review the guidelines how seamlessly they connect to whatever I am being asked to relate them to. I guess that’s why they are called universal. Regardless, connecting UDL to OER’s was no different. The UDL guidelines are centred around the “why, what and how” of learning but I discovered the OER’s connect particularly well to the “what or representation” category (CAST, 2018). In UDL representation beings with Perception, stating learners should have ways to customize how they receive the information. OER’s excel here by simply utilizing the technology and its ability to let the learner decide how they would like to receive the information. Next is Langauge and Symbols, OER’s integrate this by encouraging a community of learners to be built which in theory could support each other across language barriers and with nuances of syntax and languages. Finally, UDL considers options for comprehension which OER’s achieve by again utilizing a community of learners to activate prior knowledge and make generalizations across the material. OER’s are also a key part of Open Education in general which is based on students mastering the material rather than representing it in a certain way which again fits perfectly into the UDL guidelines.
In order to discuss my use of OER’s in the past, present and future I think it is necessary to define the context in which this use occurred. In the past I was a university student, doing my undergrad in education. In the present, I am an educator myself who has taught grades 3,4,6,7 and learning support. In the future, I will continue to be a teacher but one who is curious about how to bring OER’s to students who are in less advantageous financial situations.
In the past, as a student myself, I used OER’s without knowing that I used them. Until July I didn’t know what an OER was and simply used Ted Talks and other OER’s the same as any other tool. I never stopped to consider how incredible it was that all this information is free and available to me with a few clicks of a button.
In the present, I use OER’s in my classroom. I utilize Ted-Ed and NEWSELA frequently when I teach middle school as they are accurate, engaging and interesting sources of information. The students enjoy using this technology and honestly, it makes my life easier as well. However, as I mentioned previously I had no idea I was using OER’s and plan to bring my students’ attention to the fact that they are free, huge, accurate, and designed to bring education to massive amounts of people who may otherwise not be able to access it.
Throughout this course, something has bothered me and it is how do we bring OER’s to people from lower-income situations who may not have a stable internet connection or access to a personal device to use the internet. That is where I chose to focus my intention going forward with my use of OER’s in the future. Cronin highlights that Open Education and the use of OER’s is driven by privilege, people with privilege are the ones calling for it and creating the resources (2020). Throughout the course, I have considered this in the variety of activities we did relating to accessibility and equity of Open Education and I am honestly still not sure how we overcome this hurdle. A study was conducted by Leigh-Ann Perryman, Alison Hemmings-Buckler and Tim Seal that brought OER’s to an impoverished area of India (2014). The study is extensive, and worth reading but the results left me with more questions than answers. They stated how important cultural context was to consider before inundating these people with massive amounts of information, they also concluded that forcing, for lack of a better word, people to use OER’s really went against the true purpose of OER’s (Perryman, Hemmings-Buckler, Seal, 2014). All in all the study left me with just as many questions about the equity of OER’s and the accessibility of open education. However, throughout this course, I have learned that learning isn’t necessarily complete when the time frame is over which is why I plan to spend some time learning more about using OER’s in areas of poverty in the future.
Bibliography
CAST (2018). Universal Design for Learning Guidelines version 2.2. Retrieved from http://udlguidelines.cast.org
Cronin, C. (2020) Open at the Margins. Rebus Community Pressbooks. Retrieved from: https://press.rebus.community/openatthemargins/
Perryman, L-A., Hemmings-Buckler, A., & Seal, T. (2014) Learning from TESS-India’s Approach to OER Localisation Across Multiple Indian States. Journal of Interactive Media in Education (2:7), pp. 1-11. DOI: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1048644.pdf
Weller, M. (2018, August). Twenty Years of Edtech. EDUCAUSE Review, 53(4). Retrieved from https://er.educause.edu/articles/2018/7/twenty-years-of-edtech#fn25
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