Teacher Editorial | By Lisa Hailes
For Beginners by a Beginner
I am a fairly seasoned educator; I have completed graduate courses in technology and am considered a go-to person for technology integration in our school. Yet the pace at which new technologies emerge means that there are many areas where I am definitely still a beginner. Open Educational Resources (OER) has been one of those areas. Until recently I would hear terms in conversations such as Open Universities, MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), Open Education, Open Resources, licencing, etc. and be able to follow what was being talked about but was very fuzzy in my actual understanding of what it all meant. Not long before that, my thoughts were that OER was something awesome that was happening in higher education but didn’t really know that it would become relevant in K-12 education. It is relevant. OER are here, they are the future and they matter.
Why Are Teachers Hesitant about OER?
I think that when teachers first start to think about OER, they are often intrigued but overwhelmed. Teachers are working so hard to be able to balance the many demands of the classroom. With a range of learners in the classroom, teachers already spend so much time creating resources and personalizing them to meet each learner where they are at and customize the delivery of their content to create individual learning experiences that are content rich yet engaging.
Continue reading “Getting Started with Open Educational Resources”
In the happenstance of career pathways, I was able to interrupt my decades of teaching and leading in rural Alberta with two recent international travels, one to an Alberta accredited school in Qatar (2014) and another to a BC certified campus in South Korea (2017). Both offshore learning environments reminded me very much of my earliest years in a small Alberta school surrounded by long and seemingly empty distances – far from my colleagues and their enviable urban density. I, like these new global educators, was eager to form collaborations, to grow a bank of professional resources and proven skill-sets. The universal need was and is to feel less isolated as a novice educator (Sleppin, 2009). My own outreach became dependent on my teamwork for Alberta Education – where I could grow my contact base and resource knowledge while conducting the contracted research. For young academics in their cross-border adventures, I would also suggest designated time, segments fostered in a continuum of digital dialogues and framed by their own research design.