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My reflections on lesson 2

Dorsaf Ben Malek — Sun, 19 Nov 2023 10:16:55 +0000

Hello everyone.

As required, I am going to share my reflections on lesson 2 here. First of all, it is crucial to choose the tools I am used to in my daily practices as a teacher and a researcher. I here mean Google docs and slides which are user-friendly and easily accessible to my colleagues and students. I personally use them to collaborate with my international partners in virtual exchange programmes or in international projects. They facilitate our collaboration and make it more effective especially with less amount of email discussions and exchanges. We can write our reflections and apply our modifications directly on the original document or presentation. I also advise my students to use these two tools for their collaborative work being online students basically. I can share links to Google slides so that I can see their discussions and contributions while producing their presenattions. I can therefore detect those who really contributed to the work and those who did not.

Answering the questions of how to evaluate OER and how to produce good quality OER? In my opinion, we should refer back to the needs of the students first, then the learning objectives and outcomes. I usually carry on a small needs' analysis survey among my students to make sure what they really need and most of all want and desire to learn before I start teaching them. This step may not be on a yearly basis because I usually have the same type and level of students and disciplines. This way, I can formulate or choose an adequate set of material that meets their needs, wants, and desires together with the learning objectives that I consider crucial to their learning process and discipline.

Finally, the criteria that I mostly abide by when adopting OER are mainly related to the nature of online teaching and learning. I use a lot of presentations that can be employed in an online environment especially during synchronous sessions.

Introduction

mluther2001 — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 05:32:47 +0000

I am new to OER, and that means, my department of Open, Distance, and eLearning (ODEL) is not privy to it either. Since the COVID-19 pandemic we have focused so much on eLearning, and not explored Open Education. This is an opportunity to learn about OER, and seek to pilot it too in my University. This is to mean that I will need to benefit from collaboration in this group, and develop an understanding that can guide me in piloting the same in partnership with our University's eLibrary.

My experience with OER

Dorsaf Ben Malek — Sat, 11 Nov 2023 11:40:12 +0000

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.