Open Education Practices

OPEN EDUCATIONAL PRACTICES

Ehler 2011, defined Open Education Practices as “Collaborative practice in which resources are shared by making them openly available and pedagogical practices are employed which rely on social interaction, knowledge creation (peer learning) and shared learning practices”. Ehler adds that “OEP support the (re) use and production of OER through institutional policies, promote innovative pedagogical models, and respect and empower learners as co-producers on their lifelong learning paths”.

According to Chiappe and Adame (2018), “Open Education Practices can cover several dimensions, including assessment, teaching and educational planning”

Five Conditions

OER: Teaching materials used within OEP should be openly licensed, and the resources produced during the course (e.g., reports, presentations, videos) should also be released as OER.

Enabling technology: Teachers should make use of different technologies and tools to build and support a connected learning community where the OEP can flourish. These technologies and tools include OER authoring tools, OER repositories, social networks, and collaborative editing tools.

Open teaching: Educators should implement teaching methodologies that can help students to construct their own learning pathways (self-regulated) and to actively contribute to knowledge building, both individually and collaboratively.

Open collaboration: Teachers should build open communities, for instance by using social networks, to help students to work in teams to carry out particular learning tasks (e.g. editing a blog, creating a Wikipedia page) as well as to exchange ideas and discussions related to those specific learning tasks. Other teachers and stakeholders can participate in these discussions as well to further assist learners.

Open assessment: Teachers should allow learners to evaluate one another (peer assessment). This can emphasize reflective practices and improve learning outcomes.

Challenges of using OER and OEP by teachers

• Copyright related challenges; “copyright is one of the challenges of using online resources. Indeed, during OEP development, teachers should pay attention to the attributed open license of each OER to ensure its legal use in their context”, (Yang, S. 2020).
• Difficulty by educators to select the best and most appropriate online resources. According to Prof ID 12, “teachers might not be familiar with the process of choosing the most suitable resources to use in their teaching processes”. This is not only laborious but directly affects the quality of the teaching and learning process.
• Educators might lack the necessary technical digital skills to develop their OER and how to use the open education practices. In this case, it may not produce the intended learning outcomes.