Open Educational Resources

The world has really become ‘’flat’’ as Friedman mentioned in his book ‘’The world is flat’’. As a result of drastic changes, individuals get the opportunity to collaborate and compete globally, share with others of different cultures, religion, languages, thus connecting with the rest of the world much more easily. Now the world is changing at a very fast pace and the access to higher education is extremely necessary. The advent of the Internet opened huge and immense possibilities for learning, giving the opportunity to access to all kinds of resources, educational materials and content that is easily distributed and contributed. Thus, the Internet has a great influence on The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. 

OER is a free access to a variety of online courses and other educational

materials. OER are very organized and present a real platform for social learning. As Brown Adler mentioned, there was a shift of the focus from what we are learning to how we are learning. There is a shift from ‘’I think, therefore I am’’ to ‘’We participate, therefore we are’’. This is really a great change as social learning is a process where student construct their knowledge themselves. So, OER and the resources of the Web 2.0 create new kinds of open participatory learning for students. I come across so many great websites, software and open source for OER, where students can easily enroll and take a course. It includes different subjects each having their syllabuses, reading materials, assessment strategies, course format and the procedure is very clear-cut. The most outstanding ones to be mentioned are the online courses coursera.org and ocw.org that I will definitely take some of them in summer.

The idea of online course is somehow a new experience for Armenian students. It is flexible in terms of time and place. OER can be used for high level of proficiency of students outside the classroom but only ensuring that the students have a computer with a headset and good internet connection. For example, it can be applied in a university setting meeting the needs and interests of the students. For example, I remember myself learning a subject called conversational English. We had a lot of readings and vocabulary specific to both American and British English. However, it lacked communicative activities. For example, it would be very effective to take an online course along with that subject. When doing group work in class, we found an online course about American English pronunciation and vocabulary that will fit the subject. It will compliment the course and give many benefits to students in terms of enriching their knowledge and broadening views by expanding their educational scope.

From teachers’ perspective, OER has the potential to support enhanced teacher collaboration as well as information sharing about resources, practices and teaching challenges. OER has many advantages as it reduces teacher isolation and contributes in expanding teachers’ roles and becoming more active innovators as they share and learn from one another.