For my showcase blog post, I have decided to go with topic #3.

Topic 3 discussion:

The first reading, “A guide to making open textbooks with students” provided ways to alleviate students’ financial barriers, which is Open Educational Resources (OERs). The author provided the idea that students should not affect their motivation to learn because of high textbook fees (Mays, 2017). I had the experience that many professors wanted to help students to alleviate their financial barriers, they provided free digital textbooks or decided not to use the textbook. However, students who cannot afford the fee of textbooks may find informal ways to get textbooks, which is against the purpose of education. Also, I bought several textbooks of my elective books, I only attend one class for my interest, and the course may only cover few chapters of the textbook.

OERs are characterized by 5 Rs, which are retained, revise, remix, reuse, and redistributed. I understood that Open learning is a process that reviews your learning outcomes and does some remix and revised. Part of the final portfolio of EDCI339 is to review our past work, and add some new thoughts, and combined them.

Altering reading “Design Principles for Indigenous Learning Space,” the development of the digital community plays an important role in the Learning process of Indigenous culture. I have taken a course on Indigenous. I learned that most of their culture is passed on orally in the past. However, with the open and distributed learning environment, they can better retain their own culture and accept culture from different groups.

The last reading: “Digital Redlining, Access, and Privacy” demonstrated the idea of digital redlining. It is my first time recognized the problem. Digital redlining may shape our perceptions of race and gender.

I have thought about the question: Will expensive textbooks be canceled in the future?

Here is the link to my topic #3: https://daiy10.opened.ca/topic-3-discussion/

I want to continue my topic #3 because I felt I learned a lot about OERs and 5 Rs. Things that I added: I add more thoughts of relationships between motivation and textbooks. Before this week, I just knew the definition of 5 Rs. After I starting do my digital portfolio, I believed I experienced 5 Rs. So, I shared my personal experience on 5 Rs.

“A guide to making open textbooks with students” provided ways to alleviate students’ financial barriers, which is Open Educational Resources (OERs). The author provided the idea that students should not affect their motivation to learn because of high textbook fees (Mays, 2017). I believed there is a group of students who has a high motivation to study, but they cannot afford expensive textbooks. I cannot imagine that students gave up learning because of expensive textbooks. However, OERs provide free online resources for students, which help them alleviate students’ financial barriers. I had the experience that many professors wanted to help students to alleviate their financial barriers, they provided free digital textbooks or decided not to use the textbook.

From my personal experience, this is my first EDCI course. I had no idea about open and distributed learning at the beginning of the course. We started in bright space as distributed learning, then transferred to WordPress as an open learning environment. Our blogs are open, students can read and leave comments. When I leave a question, my pod members will provide their thoughts about it. Here are some comments from Allen and Gurbir:

 

After reading their comments, I think expensive textbooks will not be canceled, and some students still need them. However, OERs will become more popular because more students know OERs after the pandemic and benefit from them.

Moreover, when I writing the showcase blog post, I review my past discussions and add new thoughts. I retain my original post at the top, and I revise and remix it into a new post, then redistributed it to the site of the digital portfolio. After I doing the project, I had to better the undertaking of 5Rs. I believed when you experienced it, you can better understand it.

Overall, I learned a lot from the course. I think it is quite an interesting course and I enjoy it so much!

Reference:

Mays, E. (Ed.). (2017). A guide to making open textbooks with students. Rebus Community.

Wiley, D. & Hilton, J. (2018). Defining OER-enabled Pedagogy. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 19(4).