Article
20-12-2024
Learning without barriers
‘The central question for me is: How do we put education in motion? How do we strengthen each other’s innovation power and how do we enable learning without barriers? With learning without barriers, one quickly thinks of making education more flexible and enabling personal learning routes. However: learning and working with digital OERs is also about learning without barriers. Think of instructors and learners having optimal access to a rich, varied and up-to-date range of educational resources. This allows instructors to design their teaching with an optimal mix of OER and commercial educational resources. And learners themselves can choose educational resources for additional explanation of a subject or to view a subject from different perspectives.’
Enabling continuous knowledge development
‘In my opinion, learning and working with digital educational resources is about enabling continuous knowledge development. And precisely in that word ‘continuous’ lies the challenge we are working on as a transformation hub Digital Educational Resources. How do we (collectively) remove barriers? That is what I would like to work on as a leader.
For example, by:
- Emphasising the public value of educational resources: accessibility for everyone and everywhere.
We see that institutions ‘give away’ many educational resources and/or knowledge products to publishers, for example. It costs us, and especially learners, a lot of money unnecessarily to buy knowledge products (in books, methodologies) ‘back’. Learners also complain about having to log on to different (publishing) platforms. We are becoming increasingly dependent on the platforms: just switching is difficult. In this way, we organise barriers instead of ensuring that teachers and learners have barrier-free access to educational resources. Jointly directing the creation, sharing, reuse and procurement of digital educational resources is therefore important. After all, we created our educational resources with public money. - Emphasise collective collaboration on educational resources: from keeping to sharing
We also stimulate learning without barriers by sharing our developed educational resources much more. From the mbo and hbo levels, we have an enormously diverse and high-quality supply. Why not make these materials available: as individuals or from subject communities but also collectively. This can form a powerful counterweight towards publishers. And perhaps more importantly: teachers and learners have much more to choose from, which stimulates reuse. - Emphasise knowledge circulation for innovation: from static to dynamic
In my work, I keep asking myself how we can future-proof education, especially in these times of digital transformation. Do we digitise educational resources or, through working on digital educational resources, do we innovate education? I am thinking of jointly, with teachers and/or learners, just-in-time adaptation of existing learning materials to one’s own context or issue: in all kinds of manifestations. Or (further) developing adaptive or interactive learning materials. It is always about adding new knowledge value to existing material. Educational resources are then not just end products, but a starting point for new contexts. That is why it is so important to make educational resources FAIR and openly available to everyone. In other words: findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.’
Education on the move
‘We have a lot to do: innovate education together and enable barrier-free learning. Will you join us? A first invitation, for example, could already be to join the conversation on the Value of Open. This in response to the discussion paper I drafted together with Community edusources. In short: I am open to ideas, sharing experiences and questions!’
