I started using OER as a learner and continued to benefit from them as a teacher and a researcher. And because I am 'haunted' with intercultural communication, I became interested in the intercultural and multicultural aspect of OER. Actually, I delivered a presentation entitled 'How open are open educational resources' in an OER international conference. In this presentation I tried to raise awareness on the importance of producing culturally inclusive OER.
Being an e-tutor teaching hundreds of online students has been my main motivation to adopt OER in my teaching practices. I am also the national coordinator of English programmes at the Virtual University of Tunis which makes me responsible for designing various curricula for different target groups of students which is not easy at all. Thus, employing OER helps me a lot in scenarising and customising English courses on the UVT Moodle platform. OER are also crucial for the design of my activities and tasks to teach asynchronously and synchronously since the resources I adopt from OER are mainly designed for online teaching. OER are equally helpful for me to design my formative and summative tests. I must confess that it was very difficult and time consuming for me to create my proper materials from scratch. To summarise, adapting OER saves me a huge amount of time and effort in designing my courses and teaching practices. They somehow play the role of a guide and inspiration for me as a practitioner.
Hello to all,
I started to gain experience as an open educator only in the last two years, when I took part in two international projects. I sometimes find it challenging to develop such content, because you have to think wider. You don't just have a group of "your" students in front of you, whom you know roughly. Students with different interests, from different fields, with different basic knowledge, can also access the material.
I have not used OER in their entirety in my own teaching yet (only as a short test). I intend to use them for the first time this academic year, since both projects ended and all results & materials are completely available. Of course, I will first experiment with the materials that I have been involved in preparing & creating myself. In the future, I would also like to incorporate materials from other authors.
What I really like is, that the materials are available to all students at the same time, what is often a problem. Additionally, the materials or part of them are often also available in their native language, which will further increase the understanding and impact of the learning process.
