Open Educational Resources

 

 

Open Educational Resources (OER) provide free access to different kinds of educational materials to all those who wants to use these materials. This movement started in 2001and it meets the needs of all those who are interested in knowledge. The most interesting aspect of this kind of learning is that users of OER share ideas and communicate with people who all have common interests in different parts of the world.

It meets the needs of twenty first century learners and educators who can have access to the information they are interested in whenever and wherever they want. The choice of the information depends on each individual. The learners can also talk to people around the world about their problems in a social context.

As an ESL teacher and as a student of a master’s degree program I totally support the idea of using the internet and especially EOR, because it makes my life easier. I seek knowledge and I always want to be updated to all the new methods and activities of teaching English as a foreign language, so searching on line helped me a lot in the past and it helps me now while I am doing my research projects at the TEFL program. Unfortunately I don’t have much time as before to search for new activities and methods, but I am using the internet in teaching and in my education as I said before. I really like the idea of blogging and the idea of using moodle as a medium of communication between our instructors and peers. I wish I had more time to check my blogs more often and be more active on line. Another important great educational resource for me as a student is the online library, Papazian library of the American University of Armenia which makes thousands of students lives easier.

OER have many advantages plus to the ones that I have personally experienced, when I have read the article I really had great ideas of how to use OER in teaching high school students and even graduate and undergraduate students. Here is a site for free robotic telescopes  (http://faulkes-telescope.com/). I really liked this project for astronomer students, that provides them training and where students and expert astronomers can work collaboratively. I this website you can find reports of small but meaningful contributions of student astronomers. The use of OER in higher education is not only in astronomy, history and science but it is also very effective in Arts, Humanities and in many other majors. We just need qualified teachers and educators with wide horizons to be able to apply the technology in classes.