Comments on: Rory McGreal visits Unisa

By: Micheal van Wyk

Micheal van Wyk — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:46:41 +0000

I am excited for this particular movement. OER is the way for ODL. It was an very informative presentation on how to use OER in teaching and learning especially when we want our students to become self-directed learners in this digital space.

Adapt or vanish!!

By: Rory McGreal

Rory McGreal — Wed, 23 May 2012 13:33:23 +0000

It was great meeting with everyone and I was impressed by your university’s commitment to OER. You are in a position to be world leaders in OER. This week the EU announced that that there is 80 billion Euros for research and it will only be distributed to researchers who open their research and deposit it online. So, many countries are moving to open resources. We are on the right track for the future.

Remeber that OER are important not only because they are FREE, but because with the growth in accessibility to digital content using tablets, ebooks, mobile phones and other devices, learners will be able to have full access to the world’s knowledge using the internet. Unfortunately, this knowledge is being closed off with “walled gardens” created by proprietary content owners. They purposely “cripple” these new devices by disallowing copying, highlighting, sharing, format shifting and other educationally useful features using Digital Rights Management (DRM). The owners also believe that when you use their content, they have a right to “invade” your device and plant monitoring systems and other spyware. Their licensing is also so restrictive that it becomes a crime to use their content in collaboration with other learners and they reduce your “ownership” of the content to a rental agreement for a limited time in a limited geographical area for limited uses that they control. Because of these restrictions on proprietary content it is essential for educational institutions to switch to OER that are open to whatever use we want, whether that be format shifting, mixing, mashing or augmenting. With OER can we even make the learning materials better.

By: Elizabeth Archer

Elizabeth Archer — Wed, 23 May 2012 11:47:04 +0000

It is really wonderful to see that CEDU is engaging with OER to such an extent. Please keep us up to date on the progress.

It is an exciting time to be at Unisa and engaging in OER.

By: Louis van Niekerk

Louis van Niekerk — Wed, 23 May 2012 06:49:14 +0000

I am really excited about the development irs OER’s at Unisa. Where the College of Education is busy developing a new PQM, one of the principles is that all programmes will use open education resources as far as possible. OER’s will be the first option and only if there is not any appropriate oer resource available will other resources be considered.

Not only will we be using open resources, but we also want to contribute material to be used as open resources.