After a semester of EDCI339, I believe that we have more insights into this interesting and fresh learning model. Online education, as its name implies, is to break the traditional face-to-face teaching method of learning, use the development of technology and network, learning online. Through the network, students and teachers can carry out teaching activities even if they are separated by thousands of miles. In the current epidemic special period, all courses in the school this semester and in the summer’s adopt the mode of online courses, which fully reflects the convenience and mobility of online education. So what are the aspects of online education? Online education content can be online courses, online textbooks, online research articles or videos, etc. It takes a variety of forms. The teaching and research resources that are released under the an intellectual property license to be freely, informs and reused by others in the form of books, videos, tests or quizzes, and any other tools are called open educational resources. “Contemporary social technologies are used by hundreds of millions of users, available for free, and are engaging and fun to use, making them appropriate to be harnessed for teaching and learning and in particular to enhance social interactions” (Brown, 2010, Hamid et al., 2014, Hemmi et al., 2009, Seaman and Tinti-Kane, 2013, Selwyn, 2012). Open educational materials, or techniques used to support the acquisition of knowledge, bring convenience to students and challenge to both teachers and students.
EdX is a famous open educational resource, which was recommended to me by the professor of mathematics in China at the beginning. It is an online teaching program jointly launched by MIT and Harvard University in May 2012. The main purpose is to cooperate with campus teaching, improve teaching quality and promote online education. The platform is popular not only abroad but also in China. Several prominent Chinese universities are involved, including tsinghua university, Peking University, the university of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong university of science and technology.
The guide for evaluating open educational resources are mainly divided into six aspects,which are relevance, accuracy, production quality, accessibility, interactivity and licensing. As we can see on the official website, edx contains many popular subjects, such as computer science, linguistics, finance and management, engineering, anthropology and so on. You can also use the search bar for the keywords you are looking for, and each subject is related to many useful resources. I have been using edx for nearly 4 years, and I have not found any major mistakes in its resources. As mentioned above, it is an online learning platform built by more than 140 universities around the world, which shows its official nature and credibility. The layout and interface operation of edx make people clear and easy to understand. It puts the key words of subjects that users search more on the homepage, and users can see these information directly. In addition, the search bar is highlighted in the center of the screen instead of the upper right corner. When we choose a want to learn the subject, to the left side of the interface gives us more options, such as the time of publishing, the level of the course, (introductory intermediate or advanced). This allows users to better according to their own situation to choose courses.
Most importantly, on edx, we can choose the language of the course, not only English, which also gives users more opportunities to learn. This may be the magic of OER. Users can choose their favorite or familiar ways or languages to achieve the most effective learning methods. All videos on edx can be subtitled, so there is no need to worry about not hearing any sentence clearly. Users can achieve the highest learning efficiency through visual and auditory effects. If you are not registered or logged in to edx, you can still use the above resources, the video will be presented in the form of YouTube video, users can subscribe to YouTube.
In the entry interface of each course, the system will tell you how many students have registered for the course. This number is a powerful number, just like in school. These are the students you study with, which also increases our enthusiasm and participation in learning. For the licensing, edx allows users to download or share resources, and edx displays its own icon on the main screen, as well as the icon of the university offering the courses, so ownership of educational resources is legally recognized.
Finally, I believe that OER changes the way we learn, enabling all-round communication through the Internet to improve learning efficiency. Anyone, anytime, anywhere can learn. OER plays a dominant role in both learning and work in the future, making full use of resources. For me, when I choose OER, I will find that I can record all the teaching content. If I am not clear about some knowledge, I can watch the teaching content repeatedly and improve my learning ability and review ability.
References
Brown.S（2010）From VLEs to learning webs: The implications of Web 2.0 for learning and teaching. Interactive Learning Environments, 18 (1) (2010), pp. 1-10.
Guide for evaluating open educational resources retrieved from
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