What is your point of view on this somehow opposing and contradicting ideas? And how would you use this approach in your classroom?
Forum post 5
I would recommend students using free online courses to complement their knowledge and to prepare for their studies abroad. As it is mentioned in Knox’s article, “The OER movement proposes extensive free access to information in the form of web-based digital resources for teaching, learning and research, and is associated with a wide range of projects including MITs ‘Open-CourseWare’, and the ‘OER University’” (Macintosh, McGreal, and Taylor 2011, 822). The fact that OER provides free resources is especially important for vulnerable groups of people. Further, it is confirmed in the article that its mission is to give opportunities to study for those individuals who cannot get them in any other way. For example, Coursera offers an excellent course “Social Pedagogy Across Europe” https://www.coursera.org/learn/social-pedagogy-europe for free, which would otherwise cost 1,125 dollars for one credit hour (average American university course is usually worth 3 credits, so 3,375 dollars per course). Teachers or students who are going to become teachers cannot afford such extortionate fees, so OER can promote educational equity.
Jeremy Knox (2013) Five critiques of the open educational resources movement, Teaching in Higher Education, 18:8, 821-832