Context: OER as a response to the global pandemic and the principal of 'Education for All'
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many further and higher education institutions have had to transition to online teaching. This is a major challenge for educators and students alike. The transition has happened very fast, as the coronavirus pandemic spread rapidly around the globe. In order to "contain the current outbreak" …, "very strong measures" (WHO, 2020) needed to be taken. One of them saw teaching moving online. In order to face these challenges, support needs to be provided to educators and learners to make this transition. It is not just as simple as switching on a computer and facilitating courses online. It is a complex technological and pedagogical move. One possible solution to meet the sudden demand for online training and learning materials are open educational resources (OER) and open educational practices (OEP), in order to be able to effectively implement and facilitate online teaching.
The UNESCO definition of open educational resources OER describes it as ‘teaching, learning or research materials that are in the public domain or released with licenses that facilitate (their) free use, adaptation and distribution’ (2020).
It is generally agreed that OER history began around the time of the MIT OpenCourseWare. Since those times, the complexity, the variety, awareness and popularity of OERs has exploded. A recent survey (Bay View Analytic, 2019) reports that students gave an example set of OER a quality rating of ‘equal to commercial alternatives’. In addition, there is growing evidence that more and more institutions and individual teachers are offering learners OER courses (Griffiths et al. 2018).
The conditions have long been set for OER to come to the forefront of global, equitable and inclusive education. UNESCO has called for OER to be at the forefront of the ‘massive disruption of education due to the Covid-19 pandemic’ (2019).
As a group of further and higher education practitioners, we decided we would play our small part in this process by creating this website as a platform for accessing educational materials in the areas we identified as being of most interest to the wide range of students we work with. Furthermore, our website would provide opportunities for continuous communication and interaction, which is a challenge for educators and students during the immediate transition to online learning (Park, n.d., cited in Peking University, 2020). For this purpose, commonly used tools such as social media and blogs, would enable visitors to the website to connect, contribute and reflect for the open sharing of educational content and ideas (Weller, 2020). This would also increase access for those still unfamiliar with Information and Communication Technology (Rennie, 2020).
In addition, to supplying materials, a pedagogical agent (chatbot) was included to provide virtual facilitation for educational purposes (Savin-Baden et al., 2015), and to help overcome the frustration many students encounter when instructors are not available online (Carayannopoulos, 2018). A pedagogical agent was identified as a solution by providing the anytime, anywhere assistance required by many students, as well as providing a more natural conversation type approach to humanise the experience for visitors, as opposed to using e-mails or messaging systems (Carayannopoulos, 2018). It would also assist in the navigation and easy retrieval of OER to overcome overload of vast amounts of information on the website, as well as save time in finding useful and relevant (Carayannopoulos, 2018) ‘just in time’ information.
More generally, however, in addition to aiding in the response to COVID-19, we envisaged OER and OEP playing a central role in the ‘‘Education for All’ movement (UN Resolution 70, 2015), to which most countries are signatories, part of the world’s commitment “to widen access to education … contributing to social inclusion, gender equity and special needs" (Paris Declaration, 2012).
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education institutions in particular have had to transition to online teaching, and to support educators in this rapid transition. For many who are unfamiliar with this mode of teaching / learning, the transition is a huge challenge, but solutions need to be found in order to secure their short term goals and long term survival.
To help educators and learners around the world to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic by aiding the transition to online teaching in the following ways:
Creating an online repository for the sourcing of the open educational resources (OER) for independent learning of various subject areas.
In addition to teaching / learning materials in a range of subject areas, we will place materials that support knowledge and understanding of open educational practices (OEP), its technology, tools and open pedagogy in all its forms. Our website would also enable educators and learners to contribute and reflect by providing opportunities for the open sharing of educational content and ideas, using social media and a website blog. Furthermore, we decided a pedagogical agent facility was needed to assist many students and educators, particularly those with disabilities who can no longer receive the social and academic human support they need.
The target audience for this website are educators and learners in higher education (undergraduate and post graduate students and educators) and those seeking to enter higher education in the short term (senior high school, foundation and pre-undergraduate students applying to or about to apply for entrance to Higher Education Institutions). This can include a percentage of learners / tutors in further education.
Based on our discussion of the shared list of key issues and concerns, we defined the design challenge as ‘the effective balance of the 4 key defining groups of forces: accessibility and inclusivity; sharing and assistance; trust and confidence, and time management and well-being’.
Each force of the design challenge (above) must be adequately addressed in our prototype (the repository website) for the following aims to be effectively achieved:
The response to COVID-19 to be rapid
Users can make productive use of the resources with maximum ease
Resources are perceived as legitimate/valuable learning resources
Resources to be maximally accessible
To be adequate support and socialisation for learners