Blog Post 4
The costs of textbook across different subjects have been increased over 1000 percent over the last four decades. And this can be explained by the fact that all students are required by schools to do compulsory readings, which creates profitable business opportunities for commercial textbook corporations (Jesse, 2019). Under such circumstances, the notion that open education could work as an alternative becomes popular among students. Technically speaking, Open education and its resources have come to be defined as “learning materials that can be modified and enhanced because their creators have given others permission to do so” (Opensource, 2019). Put it another way, this education philosophy is all about how learners are supposed to produce, share and accumulate knowledge.
There are a couple of reasons why open education is widely accepted by many people. First of all, high-quality education can be accessible to each and everyone regardless if they could afford expensive learning materials in the past. In addition to the monetary costs and related considerations, open education also helps remove barriers regarding outdated materials, which turn out to be too obsolete to the latest generation of learners. What is more, application of open licenses to various educational materials create opportunities for educators to collaborate in working on differentiated learning materials, and this is what makes the new method stands out.
Also, as has been briefly at the very beginning, one of the biggest appeals of open education is cost saving. Course materials can be retrieved by students via downloading from the Internet for free. This, to certain extent, lays a solid foundation for educational equality for all students who are born to deserve this. There are many textbook examples of these open education resources, such as MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), Ted and so on, all of which have turned out to hit a huge success in the world of education.
References
Jesse Stommel. (2019). TEXTBOOKS, OER, AND THE NEED FOR OPEN PEDAGOGY. Retrieved on 8th, August, 2019 from
https://criticaldigitalpedagogy.pressbooks.com/chapter/textbooks-oer-and-the-need-for-open-pedagogy/
Opensource. (2019). What is open education? Retrieved on 8th, August, 2019 from
https://opensource.com/resources/what-open-education