Open Resources: Pillars of Digital Education

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Open access material has been the foundation supporting educational efforts during the pandemic.

Open Resources: Pillars of Digital Education
exc-61717da4ab7df13842fb772c
Reading time 3 minutes
Reading Time: 3 minutes

Open access material has been the foundation supporting educational intent during the pandemic.

Faced with a contingency that has endured and crossed the barrier into normalcy, the educational sector has had to adapt. Free digital materials have been instrumental during this time in expanding repositories of knowledge that are accessible and support formal education; these are the open resources.

Based on the philosophy of open access coined by the philosopher, professor, and researcher Peter Suber, the homonymous initiative aims to promote the availability of didactic literature at no cost, allowing any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, and link the full text of the articles they access. The use of these materials is entirely free as long as it is correctly referenced and indexed.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are the pillar of the universal right to education and pursuit of peace, proclaims UNESCO. The Education Division of this non-governmental organization (NGO) focuses on monitoring and analyzing global progress in adopting the open-access philosophy and resources and developing and disseminating policies.

Besides having an open access policy for its publications, UNESCO also published a guidelines manual to understand the concept of open resources and how to produce and potentiate them. The syllabus includes fundamental issues such as the types of OER, the role of licenses in the production, publication, and distribution of free materials, the adaptation of content for specific groups, and adult literacy and awareness of online content.

Tecnológico de Monterrey (Tec) also recognizes the value and need for open-access teaching materials and has a long history of producing and supporting the distribution of open resources. Currently, academic specialists in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) and the institution’s educational leaders are collaborating with Siemens Stiftung to maximize the reach and content of both networks of knowledge. Other areas of Tec, such as the Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education, are boosters of the philosophy of free didactic tools. How does the organization contribute in this respect?

The Observatory and open access

Rather than referring to the Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education (IFE) as a site that includes open resources, we can say that the entire Observatory is an open resource by itself. Since 2014, The Observatory has been a repository of daily publications to report educational trends and provide resources for teachers. These include news, articles written by teachers, videos and Edu Trends reports, content that reaches a network of more than 217 thousand teachers and educational leaders.

The material available comes from a current and reliable curating process where more than 660 specialized sources are selected under high scrutiny and ethics. All of the above made The Observatory winner of the 2017 Best Open Education Collection, an award given by the Open Education Consortium (OEC), now called Open Education Global. This year, The Observatory IFE has been awarded one of the Open Education Awards for Excellence granted by Open Education Global in the category Best Open Curation / Repository, a prize we proudly share with the University of Edinburgh. The Prize recognized an exceptional OER curatorship on various topics organized in 59 packets handily accessible to teachers who educate children and young people between ages 3 and 18.

How to make open resources memorable?

Currently, free online materials abound and are widely used to overcome the educational challenges posed by the pandemic. However, teachers must know how to produce quality content that is easy for their students to remember. Knowing and mastering technological tools to produce didactic content is critical in the effort to create lasting learning. Our next webinar entitled “Design Memorable Classes with Innovative Technological Resources” will introduce teachers to the latest technology to craft lessons.

The live broadcast will be on our Facebook page at 4:00 p.m. (Central Mexico time) on Tuesday, October 26. We will be accompanied by the teacher Eder Pérez Zárate, a graduate in Education Sciences with training in Educational Psychology and a teacher in Education at Tecnologico de Monterrey. He is currently the Leader of Educational Innovation over the Tecnologico de Monterrey Central-South region. Eder serves as a member of scientific committees in technologies for learning for two international indexed journals. He also has extensive teaching experience at the middle school and high school levels. We highly recommend this webinar for Spanish-speaking teachers who want to familiarize themselves with the resources and methods for conducting classes that their students will remember.

Have you heard of open education resources (OER) before? Have you used them in your classes? As a student, have you relied on these to enrich your educational experience? Has the pandemic changed how often you use them? Let us know in the comments.

Translation by Daniel Wetta.


Sofía García-Bullé

This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0