How do you see OER content transforming the education landscape?
Our hope is to move away from a traditional text. This will keep current with changing research whereas a textbook can only be changed every 4-5 years. This will also help school districts/individuals save on textbook costs.
- What do you see as the main impediment to the widespread adoption of OER content by classroom teachers?
- What advantages does OER content offer that traditional resources do not?
- What about this model is inherently better than the model used by traditional content / textbook publishers?
I think you bring up a really great point about costs. As our student population changes, we need textbooks to keep up with them, and sometimes with paper textbooks, we can't afford to change our books as frequently as our student needs change.
ReplyDeleteBut there is the problem of finding the information via OER that is current. A lot of the things I saw were old. Why don't people take this stuff down? There is the problem of information overload for the teacher.
ReplyDeleteI still am going to print (use paper) for my students. They read better with a hard copy than reading from the screen.
I agree that most students read better with a hard copy than reading from a screen. My ELL students come from countries where they are used to learning from textbooks. Many of my students need to annotated the text or make translations around the text, so that they can better understand the material. I think this would be problematic with text on a screen. Also, one question or concern that popped into my head is that, when most of our students go to college, they will not be using OER. Many college classes heavily teach around textbooks. so our students should not forget the skills with decoding and understanding traditional text material.
ReplyDeleteBrian I agree that today's technology enables us to have and produce materials for our students that are up to date. Flexbooks is one great idea to help accomplish this task.
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