Reflection#1: 21st Open Educational Resource

Open Educational Resources or OERs are any sorts of publicly accessible or openly
licensed educational materials according to UNESCO. It ranges from lecture notes,
assignments, worksheets, activity tasks, textbooks, and digital media. The
implementation of distance learning in most of the world made OER more successful
and useful to teachers and learners.
While researching various OER websites, I noticed that most of them are free to use. Its
“openness” allows educational institutions to obtain the materials without paying actual
money. They can also share, post, distribute, or make alterations to the materials
depending on the attribution policy or license of the material. These instructional
materials are a big help to us teachers as it saves our time and other resources in
preparing our lessons.
However, one should still be careful when choosing the instructional material to get from
OERs. We must ensure that the materials are based on the learning competencies of
DepEd. Fortunately, most of these downloadable resources can be adapted for local
use.
While there are benefits, there are also risks of using OERs. One is the collection of
data from students. Some OERs are asking for logins or email credentials to gain
access to their pool of resources. There are doubts that students’ privacy will not be
held securely.
Hence, it is important to choose a reliable OER website or use applications that will
require consent from parents before allowing the students to share their data.
The rise of OER is significant especially during this time of flexible learning. Utilizing this
technology ensures that every student will have access to materials they needed in the
learning process.