Friesen, N. (2009). Open Educational Resources: New Possibilities for Change and Sustainability. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 10(5). https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v10i5.664
What?
This article provides the change and sustainability of the OER. Through the survey about online educational resources, the paper suggests that OER initiatives have been having sustainability challenges with insufficient operational funding support and the lack of knowledge and skills about Open Courseware among the faculty. However, the author argues that there are some factors of succession in OCW and OER, which are accessibility for global users and self-directed, informal learning, calls “enhance personal knowledge” as well as being used as courses, learning and teaching supporters or student recruitment. The successful project of open courseware production in MIT can affect the other institutions in extending their interests in the Open Courseware. The important thing is that openness can be a catalyst for innovations in order to be progressive change in education.
So What?
I have thought about the other factors influencing OCW use intentions among university students since this article does not provide the perception of the users. When I started my masters program in 2008, OCW was quite sensational for Korean students as they can learn English language as well as the subjects from MIT Open Courseware. As a global user of OCW in the past, I assumed that many Korean students’s usage intentions of OCW would be diverse experience using OCW and it could be fun, new and kind of light and entertaining materials. Since there were not sufficient programs to educate students how to use the OCW properly, the OCW or KOCW(Korean-Open Courseware) ended up for students by not expanding academic exchange with the world’s leading universities and they had difficulties with sustainability of KOCW and failure to meet the students’ continuous use intentions of OCW.
Now What?
Today’s society is based on knowledge and I believe open-courseware or open educational resources can be helpful for learners and instructors to do their work effectively for learning and teaching. However, there are many barriers to expand this useful tools because of funding or lack of interests in practice. Even though educators have positive intentions of OER, giving them incentives seems to be necessary. In addition to faculty, in order to improve leaners’ perception, they should be given opportunities to approach OCW or OEW with a variety of strategies to use it properly so that they can obtain benefits from the academic cooperation in global educational activities.Â