3. Implementing strategies to shift the role of the educator.[1] This motive has been important in many educational programmes, where educators have sought to maximize the educational impact of contact time with students. As this time is generally the most significant component of variable educational costs, many educators have sought to use it to stimulate engagement and interaction rather than simply talking to mostly passive students. Again, though, this shift is not a feature of all education. Many educators continue to use contact time to perform very traditional functions, leaving no space for meaningful engagement between educators and students. As importantly, many educators do not embed the logic of engagement into resources themselves, often simply creating resource-based versions of traditional lectures. This trend is also pervasive in resources being shared under open licences, where many courses simply involve electronic mark-up of lecture notes into formats that can be shared online.
4. Investigating the potential that the integration of new educational technologies into teaching and learning environments has for supporting, improving or enhancing those environments. Given the explosive growth in the use of ICT in education around the world, it is important to add this motive to the list of motives for engaging in resource-based learning. This leads then onto the second dimension of OER, which has been driven by the rapid digitization of content made possible by ICT.
The digital dimension
The past 20 years have seen rapid development in ICT, and an accompanying explosion of ICT-related activity in education, as educational institutions and
- ↑ This changing role can be summarized as follows:
- Educators will become facilitators and managers of learning in situations where they are no longer the source of all knowledge.
- Educators will plan, negotiate for, and manage the integration of learning in formal institutions, in the workplace, and in communities.
- Many educators may spend a considerable proportion of their workloads contributing to the preparation of courseware.
- Many educators will interact with students at a distance through any one, or any combinations, of a variety of media (of which real-time face-to-face interaction is only one of many possibilities).
- Educators time spent in preparation, management and logistics will vary greatly between the following modes of communication:
- Interaction with students;
- Presentation of one-way television broadcast;
- Video conference that hooks up a number of remote sites;
- Online facilitation;
- Written response to a student’s assignment; and
- Face-to-face facilitation.
- It will be essential that educators design and administer record-keeping systems (online or offline) that keep track of students’ progress through their individual learning pathways – pathways that reflect individual variations in learning content, learning sequence, learning strategies, the learning resources, media and technologies chosen to support them, and the pace of learning.
- Increasing proportions of educators’ work will involve them as members of teams to which they will contribute only some of the required expertise, and of which they will not necessarily be the leaders, managers or coordinators.
29
