^{"OER challenges" by OPENLang Network is licensed under CC BY 4.0}

What are the Challenges in using OERs in language education?

There are several obstacles that every language  teacher who wishes to integrate OER in his/her teaching practice needs to overcome. As research has shown,  it  is  not  an  easy  task  to  discover appropriate  language  OER  for specific language  and  educational  objectives (Perifanou & Economides, 2021).The most important challenges include OER discoverability issues, quality issues, sustainability issues, time and effort issues, technological issues, intellectual property/copyright concerns, format issues as well as language and/or cultural barriers. According to Hodgkinson-Williams (2010) the most important challenges in the use of OERs are the following:

• Absence of students and learners' technical skills, specifically ICT
  skills;
• Lack of broadband networking and other technical innovations;
• Limited financial resources to allocate to develop or sustain OERs;
• Insurmountable protection of intellectual property;
• Refusal to use derivative versions of OERs;
• Lack of incentives for the creation of OERs;
• Lack of skills to discover and adopt appropriate OERs;
• Language barriers;
• Assuring quality in open content;
• Dealing with copyright issues.

Learning Activity 5

You are invited to watch the interesting video "Barriers to Open Education" by Abbey Elder is licensed under CC BY 4.0  This video is an introduction to three major barriers that have hindered the Open Education Movement over time and how they are being overcome today.

Do you  think that it is possible for teachers to overcome the major barriers in using OERs? Can you think of the  barriers that prevented you from using OERs in your language classroom?

Click here to download the video transcript (PDF) (36.0 KB)

Additional Resources

Ossiannilsson, E., Altinay, Z., & Altinay, F. (2016). Transformation of teaching and learning in higher education towards open learning arenas: A question of quality. In P. Blessinger & T. Bliss (Eds.), Open Education: International Perspectives in Higher Education (1st ed., pp. 159–178). Open Book Publishers. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1sq5v9n.13

References

Hodgkinson-Williams (2010). Benefits and challenges of OER for Higher Education Institutions. Centre for Educational Technology, University of Cape Town. https://libguides.library.cpp.edu/ld.php?content_id=13268187

Perifanou, M & Economides, A. A.(2021). Challenges for finding Language OER: Suggestions to Repositories’ Administrators. In Proceedings of the EUNIS 2021, - A New Era of Digital Transformation: Challenges for Higher Education. European University Information Systems (EUNIS) organization, Virtual Athens, 9–11 June 2021. Available at https://ruomoplus.lib.uom.gr/handle/8000/372

Learning Activity 6

In this introductory unit, you are advised to post in the Discussion Forum and interact with members of our OER learning community. Therefore, this small task has two parts. In the first part you are kindly invited to introduce yourself and briefly describe why you are interested in this course. Following that you will briefly describe how you use OER in your teaching practice or as a learning tool (if you do not teach). In the second part you are invited to reply to at least one of your classmates' posts!