Barriers against Open Educational Resources and possible Solutions: Teachers’ Perspectives and Recommendations. (original) (raw)

The Emergence of Open School Education: The Case of Open Discovery Space Portal

Nowadays, open schooling is considered an education paradigm with increasing popularity, which focuses on the learners and offers more freedom in education outside of the physical and other types of barriers such as accessibility, flexibility, affordability and availability of teacher/tutors, classrooms, schools and educational institutions. The main elements that define Open Schooling are flexible learning, based on fully exploring the potential of ICT to improve education and training systems quality and efficiency, aligning them with the current trends on ICT in education, distant learning and lifelong training. The aim of this paper is to present the current status of Open Schooling mainly in the EU, but also globally, and to identify the future trends in the field by analysing the data from the use of Open Discovery Space Platform as an Open School initiative case study. In this study, various portals, initiatives, and actors/stakeholders active on Open Schooling and Open Education are identified, classified into categories according to their content, services, and positioning in the EU school education landscape. Moreover, these open school innovation services are studied, resulting in a comprehensive overview of the current status of Open School initiatives and a discussion of the future trends in the field.

Open Educational Resources in the Context of School Education: Barriers and possible Solutions

Due to the increasing professional mobility of their parents, pupils often find themselves in new and unfamiliar learning scenarios in foreign contexts and countries. Besides having to leave their familiar environments, these pupils additionally may face language barriers, different curricula, and have to cope with foreign cultures. Printed textbooks, which are the most commonly used educational resources in schools, provide little support for these pupils to manage the new challenges. Teachers are the professionals designated to provide the necessary support. However, they often may not fully appreciate the pupils' individual challenges. Possible solutions could be the provision of alternative learning contents in the pupils' native languages and an international open exchange of knowledge and experiences amongst schoolteachers. These issues are addressed by the Open Discovery Space platform. In order to empower this platform to provide the best possible support to teachers, we explored barriers to adoption of Open Educational Practices in the context of school education and asked for manageable solutions. The investigation took place in an action research scenario.

IMPACT ON CURRICULA, SCHOOLS AND EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM: OPEN DISCOVERY SPACE LESSON LEARNT

Information and communication technologies (ICT) can provide students and teachers with access to an abundance of educational resources that might not otherwise be available. "Open Discovery Space" (ODS) is a socially-powered multilingual virtual open learning infrastructure capable of boosting the adoption of eLearning resources. The aim of this research is to explore, analyse and synthesize the lessons learnt and findings so far from the implementation of ODS in schools all over Europe after three years of the project. The results presented in this paper have been gathered from interviews and a survey study with the educational stakeholders (i.e. teachers, curriculum developer and researchers) across Europe aimed at gaining a better understanding of the teachers and student's needs, the challenges and difficulties they face, as well as their ideas and views about ODS innovative approaches, practices, processes and tools for meaningful teaching and learning. The findings will also help to identify the strategies and initiatives related to measuring and demonstrating the effective use of ICT for education with regard to the teaching and learning practices and processes to enhance the performance.

Open Educational Resources Setting the Scene

2015

The provision of licence free educational resources can be regarded as a major trend in education. Since the launch of the first open courseware projects in 2002, numerous initiatives followed. In the meantime we can talk about a worldwide Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. In advancing this movement several challenges are to be met, awareness raising and community building being top priorities. The MEDIDA-PRIX 2008 (“Mediendidaktischer Hochschulpreis”) is an initiative that intends to function as a change agent in order to sensitize the community to the idea of the OER movement.

Towards the development of open educational resources: challenges and issues

2012

The fast evolution of the Internet and the Information and Communication Technologies has leveraged and multiplied the possibilities of learning. Additionally, the advent of free and open software has also motivated research and development in the education area. As a result, there has been a change in the way that educational resources are designed, developed and delivered to learners. The term Open Educational Resources (OERs) has emerged as an attempt to standardize the educational content available in a free and open way through the Internet. The establishment and adoption of innovative processes, methods and tools for creating well-designed and highly flexible OERs are challenging for the scientific community in general and, especially, for software engineers. Indeed, Software Engineering practices and principles should be reviewed, updated and adapted for adequately deal with the developmental aspects and needs in this emerging scenario. Having this goal in mind, in this paper we identify some challenges and issues to be considered by software engineers in order to provide an adequate and efficient infrastructure to the development and adoption of OERs.

The Infrastructure of Open Educational Resources

Educational Technology, 2007

Abstract: The success of OER is likely to depend on a flexible, extendable infrastructure that will meet the challenges of an evolving World Wide Web. In this article, the authors examine three key dimensions of this infrastructure--technical, legal/cultural/social/political, and ...

Barriers and Benefits of Open Educational Resources

2018

Most OER libraries have not yet been as successful as initially predicted. This is not a new story. The same patterns of adoption and resistance have been played out in the diffusions of other educational technologies, where expectations have frequently exceeded reality due to overlooked barriers (Jamison & Klees, 1973). These include costs and logistics, but also pedagogical and cultural barriers. Parrish (2004) predicted issues for learning object adoption, many of which are born out in recent research on OER implementations. For this study, we reviewed 14 papers on the implementation of OER initiatives in a variety of contexts, as well as surveys on the use of OERs. A resulting set of potential barriers and benefits were identified, as well as recommendations for overcoming barriers and promoting benefits. Because most OER repositories have not been as successful as initially imagined, we suggest these would be useful to consider in any implementation of a new OER library.

Sharing Resources in Open Educational Communities

The spread of Internet and the latest Web developments have promoted the relationships between teachers, learners and institutions, as well as the creation and sharing of new Open Educational Resources (OERs). Despite this fact, many projects and research efforts paid more attention to content distribution focusing on their format and description, omitting the relationship between these materials and online communities of teachers. In this article we emphasize the importance of sharing resources in open educational communities (OEC), analysing the role of OERs and OEC in teachers' lifelong learning. Investigating their current usage, we aim to discover whether their interweavings could be an effective approach to support sharing of resources among teachers and to promote new educational practices. Through two surveys which involved more than 300 teachers from across Europe it was possible to highlight that is not simple to stimulate the collaboration among teachers, both online and face to face; nevertheless, when this happens, it seems to be a good way to promote formal and informal learning for teachers, as well as innovation in their professional practices.