Open Education Week 2020 events

Why Open Licences are Essential for Education

This workshop introduces Open Educational Resources and provides participants with a background on what they are; why they are essential; and how they can be effective in promoting international education. The free sharing of open educational resources (OER) can be seen as essential for promoting the creation of content for use in global education or in any other learning context, both classroom-based and online. OER are freely available and openly licensed resources (e.g. online or printed texts, videos, podcasts, games, etc.) OER can be effective in reducing the knowledge divide that separates and partitions societies.
UNESCO supports OER as a means of achieving Strategic Development Goal 4: Education for All. Educators worldwide continue to face significant challenges related to providing increased access to high quality learning, while containing or reducing costs. global education represents new and different approach to education by re-evaluating traditional teaching methods and curricula, and creating a more dynamic, relevant and powerful model reflecting current attitudes. OER, because of their flexibility can nurture the unique individuality, talent and self-assurance of each student. New developments in online learning, especially those working in international education, highlight the shortcomings and challenges for the traditional education community, as well as those of more flexible providers, such as open schools.
Education is empowered when teachers have the flexibility offered by OER to alter, adapt, update and otherwise make effective instructional use of their resources, without restrictive licensing and locks. In using the affordances of the Internet OER provide both instructors and students with the potential to increase access and flexibility in education by rendering it ubiquitous. More recently online course developers are being forced to focus on the effects of Digital Rights Management (DRM) also known as “digital locks” and restrictive licences that come with commercial online content. These cripple the content and render it problematic for use in multiple countries. So, educators need to turn to OER in order to ensure that their content is available for many different used and reuses as well as for adapting, localising and otherwise repurposing for both classroom-based and online learning.
- Open Educational Resources: Challenge of the Future (with a glimpse at the past)

Open Educational Resources: Challenge of the Future (with a glimpse at the past)

Higher education institutions worldwide continue to face significant challenges related to providing increased access to high quality education, while containing or reducing costs. New developments in higher education all speak to the efforts on the part of the traditional higher education community, as well as more flexible providers such as open universities, to address these challenges. Such developments have the potential to increase access and flexibility in higher education. Basic education for all continues to be a goal that challenges – and will continue to challenge – many countries.

Open Educational Resources (OER) constitute an important resource with the potential to facilitate the expansion of quality education and learning opportunities worldwide. OER refers to full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials or techniques used to support access to knowledge. The free and open sharing of educational resources can serve to promote the building of knowledge societies and the reduction of the knowledge divide that separates nations, as well as the divide within societies themselves.
The relevance of OER is augmented by the exponential growth in online accessibility afforded by the wide range of new applications and devices. Moreover, this is happening at an increasingly rapid pace. security, privacy and consistency coupled with user control. The growing trend toward online learning using the power of networks has opened the door for learners and teachers to access the world’s knowledge from almost anywhere, at any time. The internet houses the world’s treasure of knowledge. It is the world’s intellectual commons that renders knowledge accessible to all. The world’s knowledge is a public good that should be made available to everyone.

Guest speaker

Rory McGreal is the UNESCO/International Council for Open and Distance Education Chair in Open Educational Resources (OER) at Athabasca University, Canada. As such he is charged with promoting OER internationally particularly in developing nations in support of UNESCO Strategic Development Goal 4: Education for all. He is also co-Editor of IRRODL (International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning) a leading open access educational technology journal. He is the founder of the OER Knowledge Cloud, a repository of research articles on OER. He is also the recipient of several national and international awards for open and distance learning.