With the development of technology, people can study in various ways. People can study from books, lectures, and the internet. Online education is becoming more and more welcomed. It can provide more and wider knowledge for learners to study. Students can use online search engines to find the information they want. There are two types of content for learners to use when searching online. They are online educational content and openly licensed educational content. There are many differences between these two content.
Difference between Online Educational Content and Openly Licensed Educational Content
For the openly licensed educational content, it has an open license and open content. It is opened for learners to search. However, people need to use search engines like Google to find open resources. So openly licensed educational content is part of online educational resources. The difference is whether it has open copyright licenses. Openly licensed educational resources give people permissions. People are allowed to use, edit, share and research these resources.
Online educational resources are free for people to receive. Online educational content is open to the public and anyone can use the internet to find it. However, some resources are prohibited from being transmitted and used without the permission of the authors. There are many types of online educational resources including full courses, course materials, textbooks, modules, teaching videos, images, software and other tools and techniques that used to support access to knowledge.
Examples of OER
Lumen Learning.
The OER website I found is called Lumen Learning. You can find learning materials and content for more than 50 subjects on the website, which can greatly broaden the students’ knowledge of learning outside of textbooks. Lumen Learning also provides e-textbooks, teaching videos and other interactive materials for students to search for. The video below shows some of Lumen Learning’s advantages, such as the ability to provide students with affordable electronic textbooks. You can explore more about this OER websites through this video.
From the website OER Africa, I find the evaluation guide for open educational resources. I check the relevance, accuracy, production quality, accessibility, interactivity and licensing of this website by searching the “businesses”. The website provides me 12 courses of business. They meet these conditions and I find the course resources are very useful to me. Also, there is a sentence at the bottom of the website that said “Unless otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.”
OER in My Life
In my daily life, I find that physical books sold in bookstores are usually very expensive. So I prefer to use OER websites to search for e-books according to the courses’ requirements. Moreover, OER gives me more selections, and I can exchange and research knowledge with more students. OER also provided me with a broader knowledge and interesting resources. As students, we are required to write essays about the course we take. So it provides a good platform for us to search for the information we need. We can more easily and quickly find instead of looking in the library of thousands of books. It will stimulate my passion for learning and let me explore more.
Reference
OER Africa. (2020). What is Open Licensing?. Retrieved from: https://www.oerafrica.org/book/what-open-licensing
