Open Educational Resources

According to the article called “Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0” (Brown & Adler, 2008), in this rapidly changing world there is an increasing need for lifelong learning. Nowadays, due to the open educational recourses (OER) people can have a free access to educational recourses everywhere an at any time. Most of the valuable thing about OER is that they promote “social learning” where the main focus is on not what we are learning but how we are learning. The idea is that we can learn things through participation and interaction.

In open source communities people are not only able to use various materials for free, but also contribute to the creating or alteration of the content. For instance in Wikipedia or in other open sources you can easily track the editing process . “In this open environment, both the content and the process by which it is created are equally visible, thereby enabling a new kind of critical reading”  (Brown & Adler, 2008).

In many countries of the wold, this type of social learning has been integrated in formal education . It is interesting to mention that there are many interesting projects that enable students to work collaboratively with scientists. One of such projects is the Faulkes Telescope Project, that provides the UK students with free access to the high-powered robotic telescope.

Unfortunately, in Armenia the awareness of the notion of open educational resources is very low. This is partly because of the lack of competence and interest of the Armenian teachers in using and promoting open technologies (Danielyan and Alexandryan, 2008).

Thus, I think as teachers we have to realize the importance of introducing open technologies and contribute to raising other teachers’ and learners’ knowledge and interest in adopting and promoting the OER movement in Armenian schools.

Personally, I think that OER are a good way to become eduacated in the spheres other than my chosen profession, for example, by exploring some of the OER links I have found some useful and interesting cources, such as

Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/special-programs/sp-401-introduction-to-womens-and-gender-studies-fall-2010/

Minds and Machines
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/linguistics-and-philosophy/24-09-minds-and-machines-fall-2011/

Moral Psychology
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/linguistics-and-philosophy/24-120-moral-psychology-spring-2009/

Bilingual assessment
http://www.coerll.utexas.edu/coerll/projects/bilingual