Dreamweaving Open Educational Practices

Dreamweaving Open Educational Practices
Our starting point
There is no doubt that we had embarked on a new way toward OER at the first introductory
workshop. We discovered new ways to reach our goal with the continuous
support of our lecturers. Some of us had uploaded our creative work and made
them available in the platform to share with the others.
It was clearly visible that many of us tried to find ways relevant to the subjects we
are teaching hoping to ease the workload of the career. We continued with our
search for OER at home too, despite many personal barriers, to feed our curiosity.
After the first workshop a member has written the following reflective journal entry,
proving its success.
“2015.03.20 - I’m glad that I could participate in this research project because I
find it more useful to my profession. I usually surf the internet in search of proper
information and lesson materials for my lessons. But always had difficulties in using
them publicly due to legal framework. And OER almost solved my problem because
today I got to know about the licenses and what I can do with them. It helped me in
selecting more appropriate course material for my students. Thank you”
Using OER in the teaching-learning process is a novel experience for us as well as
students. Students gave many good comments about the lesson and their twinkling
eyes were evidence to the fact that they loved the lesson. One of the students commented
as follows: “Oh I wish that I could learn this subject and this subject only”.
As teachers we also found that it had eased the workload, increased our professionalism
as well as heights of knowledge. After integration of OER in to our teaching
process it was revealed that students turned up to the class early.
One of our team members explained how she started a new society called “Future
Minds” gathering young innovative students and motivated teachers. She also
shared the knowledge of OER and motivated them to be self-learners in interested
fields. The results of this initiative were brilliant such as winning the 2nd place in
the Young Computer Scientist competition (All-island), with many other provincial
level winners as well.
Finally, all of us had used OER to create lesson materials to be used at second stage
of our teaching practice which is a compulsory assessment in the PGDE programme.
We could face this with confidence because we always knew the results achieved
will be the best with the help of OER. The lessons we created for this assessment
were based on some quality OER materials we found and those consisted so many
new things to learn. Some examples are shown in Fig. 10.2.2.
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