Explore and engage with current literature on the distributed and open education movement
Throughout this course, we read multiple articles and chapters about distributed and open education.
In my topic 4 post, I talked about the 4 part test (Wiley & Hilton, 2018) which is a way teachers can decide whether what they are teaching reaches the criteria of OER-enabled pedagogy.
Kiana included this helpful chart in her topic 4 blog post and I thought I would include it here as well:
This chart does a great job of breaking OERs down. It also tells you to check if the resource you are using is open or CC licensed (creative commons). It also lets you know why OERs are important as they provide different forms of teaching like collaboration and creativity, as well as cost savings. Students also seem to do better in school as they all have fair access to textbooks.
My pod and I also had a great chat on Mattermost about the way we view open pedagogy and how elementary students are able to use OERs. We all are wanting to teach elementary so understanding how to use OERs properly in the classroom is super important.
In our pod project, we did a case study and created a persona for “Rebekah”. We delve into the world of distributed and open learning to decide what environment would be better for her to learn in and we decided on a distributed environment.
From completing these activities I learned that open and distributed education has been a thing for quite some time. Each year it seems more and more teachers are taking part in distributed and open learning especially due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I wonder if we never partook in online classes if we would ever be so experienced with Zoom and other online platforms. The EDCI classes I have taken have been so beneficial to my learning as a future teacher.
The distributed and open education movement is extremely important to me as a teacher as like I have said before, education is always changing and my taking courses like this one better prepares us for what is happening now and in the future. I want to say yes to all 4 parts of the OER-enabled pedagogy test whenever I can. I think bringing awareness to this type of education will also be helpful as I will constantly be thinking is this benefiting my students in multiple ways? Are they learning but also teaching?
Reference:
Wiley, D. & Hilton, J. (2018). Defining OER-enabled Pedagogy. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 19(4).
