CAS Digital Learning in Emergencies/module4-Kinan

Introduction

Open education (OE) is a philosophy about the way people should produce, share, and build on knowledge. Proponents of open education believe everyone in the world should have access to high-quality educational experiences and resources, and they work to eliminate barriers to this goal. Such barriers might include high monetary costs, outdated or obsolete materials, and legal mechanisms that prevent collaboration among scholars and educators.

Promoting collaboration is central to open education. As the Open Education Consortium says: "sharing is probably the most basic characteristic of education: education is sharing knowledge, insights and information with others, upon which new knowledge, skills, ideas and understanding can be built."

In Syria, OE was known, and started to be widespread before the crisis started in 2010 mostly through the Syrian Virtual University which started to offer students many online studies and degrees, this platform continues to offer the opportunities to the Syrian youth to continue their education and support them with resources and tools.   

Learning outcomes

The following learning outcomes are agreed in the module:

• Understand the concept of OE and OER
• Understand and analyze the open licenses
• Identify and discuss OER available in the Syrian context.

Time necessary

The needed time for this assignment is 26 Hours

Detailed description

To achieve the above learning objective, multiple articles and blogs on the subjects will be studied, triangle and notes will be taken to understand more and analyze the concept of OE and the available OER and try to reflect these issues on the Syrian context and how the OE can be improved in Syria.

I will also try to compile a comprehensive report reflecting these issues and how can they fit in our context.

Study Plan / Activities

Activity	Duration	Week	Deliverables
What is OE, challenges, and issues	06 Hours	1 – 5 May 2022	Notes on the elements of OE and challenges related to it.
Principle of OER (different articles)	06 Hours	08 – 12 May 2022	Notes on the 5Rs of using OER
Open licences	06 Hours	15 – 19 May 2022	Notes on using the open licences for educational purposes
Reflect and document the available OE and OER in the Syrian context	08 Hours	22 – 26 May 2022	Summary prepared on different OE platforms available in Syria and suggestions.

Activities

concept of OE and OER

Open education OE encompasses resources, tools and practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve educational access and effectiveness worldwide.

Open Education combines the traditions of knowledge sharing and creation with 21st century technology to create a vast pool of openly shared educational resources, while harnessing today’s collaborative spirit to develop educational approaches that are more responsive to learner’s needs.

Why is Open Education important?

Education is an essential tool for individuals and society to solve the challenges of the present and seize the opportunities of the future. However, the current provision of education is limited by educational institutions’ capacity, consequently, this resource is available to the few, not the many.  The digital revolution offers a potential solution to these limitations, giving a global audience unprecedented access to free, open and high-quality educational resources.

People want to learn. By providing free and open access to education and knowledge, people can fulfill this desire. Students can get additional information, viewpoints and materials to help them succeed. Workers can learn something that will help them on the job. Faculty can exchange material and draw on resources from all around the world. Researchers can share data and develop new networks. Teachers can find new ways to help students learn. People can connect with others they wouldn’t otherwise meet to share information and ideas. Materials can be translated, mixed together, broken apart and openly shared again, increasing access and allowing new approaches. Anyone can access educational materials, scholarly articles, and supportive learning communities anytime they want to. Education is available, accessible, modifiable and free.

Open educational resources (OER)

are freely accessible, openly licensed instructional materials such as text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing, as well as for research purposes.

The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under some licenses. These are designed to reduce accessibility barriers by implementing best practices in teaching and to be adapted for local unique contexts.

The development and promotion of open educational resources is often motivated by a desire to provide an alternate or enhanced educational paradigm.

The new definition explicitly states that OER can include both digital and non-digital resources. Also, it lists several types of use that OER permit, inspired by 5R activities of OER.

5R activities/permissions were proposed by David Wiley, which include:

·      Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage)

·      Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)

·      Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)

·      Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)

·      Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

Understand and analyze the open licenses

Open educational resources often involve issues relating to intellectual property rights. Traditional educational materials, such as textbooks, are protected under conventional copyright terms. However, alternative and more flexible licensing options have become available as a result of the work of Creative Commons, a non-profit organization that provides ready-made licensing agreements that are less restrictive than the "all rights reserved" terms of standard international copyright. These new options have become a "critical infrastructure service for the OER movement." Another license, typically used by developers of OER software, is the GNU General Public License from the free and open-source software (FOSS) community. Open licensing allows uses of the materials that would not be easily permitted under copyright alone.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are free online courses available to anyone who wants to enroll. MOOCs offer a wide range of courses in many different subjects to allow people to learn in an affordable and easy manner.

Types of open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, learning objects, open textbooks, openly licensed (often streamed) videos, tests, software, and other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge. OER may be freely and openly available static resources, dynamic resources which change over time while having knowledge seekers interacting with and updating them or a course or module with a combination of these resources.

Identify and discuss OER available in the Syrian context

After 11 years of ongoing crisis in Syria, many sources of education were destroyed, tens of thousands of schools are out of service, educational and teaching staff from all levels (basic education teachers till university teachers and lecturers) left the country. many universities and educational bodies were also partially destroyed or stopped from providing their educational services.

Those were the main part of education resources taking into consideration that the universities and some schools had a library which had many educational resources (either books or electronic resources) and they were destroyed because of the crisis, which led to big retraction of the educational resources in Syria.

on the other hand, there are many resources and online platforms available and reachable from overall the world, many of these resources are available even in Arabic language such as:

• ALESCO initiatives: http://www.alecso.org/nsite/en/mn-ict-2/projects/alecso-s-oer-promotion-project
• Open Med project, https://openmedproject.eu/
• Shams: Saudi Open education resource: https://shms.sa/

I checked many resources and platforms available (especially Arabic language platforms and resources) and found the three above mentioned resources very useful for all users and purposes. the learner can easily access them and find articles and resources related to different fields.

Conclusion

The main challenge in Syria remains the availability of educational resources. as mentioned above, the main part of educational resources were the libraries at universities and schools, and these were either destroyed or outdated and don’t have any new resources or materials. another part of the resources are the online resources and platforms where you need internet to be online and access these resources, and here come the second main problem in Syria which hinder the learners from learning or follow the available resources, which is the availability of good and stable internet connection.

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources#Licensing_and_types