This week’s reading revolved around open education resources (OER’s). I agree that human-centered learning is a perfect platform to experiment with innovative educational resources. The author describes the 5R’s (retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute) characteristics an OER would have. Overall. There is a great shortage of unlicensed and open source materials for students to participate in open learning. The author suggests the concept of renewable assignments – a kind of assignment that has greater potential than just being a tool for grading students. Renewable assignments can act as media to showcase a student’s work, and they can also be passed down to future students to study and reference.
I do agree that having an assignment to dispose of immediately after grading is wasteful and unsustainable. It is a waste of physical resources and inefficient use of a student’s time. Therefore, I believe assignments should be able to be a certificate that students’ can showcase in an employment setting or can be easily reviewed or recite in the future. However, I do not completely agree with the suggested methods of letting inexperienced students create OER’s. First of all. Resources produced through such a procedure are unregulated and not strictly peer-reviewed. Therefore misinformation could happen and affects the education of future students. Secondly, I think it’s unethical and inequality to mandate students to do extra work to produce educational materials or reward students who are willing to participate with rewards or extra credits. Students should not be obligated to participate in such events for any benefit. The creation of renewable assignments should be completely voluntary and outside of the educational system.
Excluding this course, some of my assignments are worth citing or showing in my future career. They often result from group projects that are large in scale and practically reusable. I believe it would be unfair and unethical for professors to asks us to format our materials or to create tutorials on the subject; I believe students should not responsible and are not qualifies for said activities. I think a better way to utilize those materials is to convert some outstanding ones into examples for future students. Experts should then be involved to review our work and make sure it has educational value and it’s not misleading. If particular students are extra successful in the field and show an interest in helping to develop OER’s, then they should be trained accordingly and then given the opportunity of participating in the creations.
Ultimately, I think that although OER’s are limited by their non-profit and charity-like nature. It should still only be produced by educational experts but not mere students.