WHAT IS OER?

Every child deserves access to quality education. This is emboldened in the mission of the Department of Education (DepEd) to protect and promote the right of every Filipino to quality, equitable, culture-based, and complete Basic Education where students learn in a child-friendly, gender-sensitive, safe, and motivating environment, and teachers facilitate learning and constantly nurture every learner.

Quality education need not be expensive. Teachers can find a way to facilitate learning and be unwavering in their pursuit to nurture each learner.

OER refers to free and/ or available educational materials that come with the permission of anyone to use, modify, or share. OER may include a lesson plan, a single video, a song, to a completely online course or curriculum and may also include the software platforms needed to create, change, and share the created materials.

For an educational resource or material to be open, it must satisfy the %R Activities of OER. An open license permits users of a resource to participate in the 5R activities of OER:

1. Retain: Make, own, and control your own copy of the content

2. Reuse: Use the content as-is

3. Revise: Adapt, adjust, modify, improve, or alter the content

4. Remix: Combine the original or revised content with OER to create something new

5. Redistribute: Share your copies of the original content, revisions, or remixes with others.

The use of OER results in tremendous cost savings to benefit families of students as well as impact their performance and completion rates in school.

SO WHY OER FOR DEPED?

With the advent of DepEd's Digital Rise Program, among the success factors to provide ICT-Assisted Learning and support the Curriculum strand with their ICT needs is weaved in the realization of the significance of the OERs.

The Digital Rise Program emphasizes the necessity to develop and enhance digital literacy skills amongst teachers and learners.

OER is a declaration influenced by Article 26 of the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights which says that "Everyone has the right to education," and Article 13.1 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights which "recognize the right of everyone to education."

Considering the geographical terrain and locations of remote islands in the Philippines, there is a widening gap in terms of having equal access and opportunity with the aid of technology. Embracing the use of OERs will solve challenges encountered by the public school system most especially the Last Mile Schools in terms of access to learning materials and skills to create or reuse content.

The use of OER is widely applied in countries that have no internet connectivity due to different scenarios such as armed conflicts, refugees from war zones, geographically isolated areas, and those who are affected by natural disasters. OER is a different pathway of using technology in making disconnected schools connected. It makes education more accessible to those in seemingly difficult-to-reach locations and challenging situations.

ADVANTAGES OF OER

OER also allows teachers to create material that is customized for their classes. Where most textbooks and printed materials have their strengths and weaknesses, OER has the following advantages:

1. OER material allows teachers to pull only substantial notes or topics as materials for their sets of learners. Since the presentation of OER is more flexible, teachers are able to customize content to fit the learning needs and goals of learners.

2. While OER gives teachers the freedom to create material. OER presents an opportunity to have one's own materials improved and enhanced along the way. By allowing the materials to be modified by other teachers in the DepEd community, an OER creator has a spectrum of how material evolves in ways never imagined. With more eyes, there are more valuable aspects to be seen. With more minds, better learning experiences for our learners are created. New sections and activities can be added and enhanced creating a more powerful collection of work that further enriches the original. This type of culture and collaboration is simple to possible if materials are only in print, waiting for a new edition.

3. With OER, a teacher is able to reuse, create, collaborate, and contextualize. Teachers have a wide variety of material to draw and build upon for their own classes without having to start from scratch and are allowed to collaborate with colleagues from different parts of the country and even the world.

The Office of the Undersecretary for Administration (OUA) and the Information and Communications Technology Service (ICTS), in their commitment to delivering ways and means to support the requirements of the Curriculum & Instruction (CI) Strand by using the latest technologies, will transform teachers and learners to globally competitive and have the skills at par with neighboring countries in the Southeast Asian region.

Thus, it is high time that the Philippines, thru DepEd, take advantage and support the use of OER to revolutionize the Philippine Education System to promote equitable and quality education for all Filipino learners.

HOW DO WE GO ABOUT EMBRACING OER?