After reading this week’s article, I think “OPEN PEDAGOGY” is a good approach. It makes shared knowledge available to all through “Open Educational Resources (OERs)”. According to Mays, “Open Pedagogy” is a place of practice, a place where theories of learning, teaching, technology, and social justice speak to each other and inform the development of educational practices and structures. Its five main features are: that they can be reused, retained, redistributed, revised, and remixed (Mays, E, 2017). The sharing of “OERs” allows many people who cannot afford the price of the textbooks could get the education materials. According to the article, we could know that “Even though 67% of college students in Florida and 54% of those in British Columbia cannot afford to purchase at least one of their required course textbooks”(2017). The “OERs” is a great solution to this problem, allowing many students to reduce their financial stress to focus more on their studies! Because I am a college student, many textbooks are priced at around $100, which is really expensive. The OERs allow me to have this money left over so that I can spend it on other things to help me study.

If these are the benefits for the students, the benefits for the teachers are that the students are less stressed and the number of students in the class is higher. And with open resources, teachers have access to more materials from different places to bring more knowledge to their students. And “OERs” allows teachers and students to build together because students are more able to understand the students’ ideas. Having students participate makes the material more accessible to other students, increasing learning efficiency and reducing the teacher’s burden.

So I believe that “OERs” will develop together with open learning and distributed learning to provide convenient and better learning resources for people around the world in the future. I also believe that this will become the mainstream learning method in the future.

 

Mays, E. (Ed.). (2017). A guide to making open textbooks with students. Rebus Community.  Chapter 1: Open Pedagogy: https://press.rebus.community/makingopentextbookswithstudents/chapter/open-pedagogy/