1st learning reflection

I think my perception of the issue of OERs has changed in the past few months.  I can definitely see the statistic that 66% of the children in Sub-Saharan Africa did not have the privilege of attending secondary school.”  But even past that, many of those children who do get that ‘privilege’ have a subpar experience, particularly with resources they (and their teachers) have access to.  My school in Rwanda is better funded than the majority of the schools in the country.  And yet, the students don’t have textbooks for many of their classes.  And the books they do get can be extremely low quality or outdated because of the price.  The most notable example is the computer book, which was published in 2009.  That isn’t very long ago, even by technology standards, but it includes references to VERY outdated concepts, such as floppy disks, so it clearly was written much before that.

In my own American university experience, I remember trying to buy textbooks and being required to get the newest edition of a text, despite the fact it had minimal difference, or to get the book with an unused product key for the technology supplement, thus requiring you to buy a new one.  When I could get away with it, I would buy used or international editions.  Most of that information could be found online anyways and I sometimes only opened the book a few times that semester.

I think people are becoming more and more aware of these issues.  For example, the state of California has made their newest STEM textbooks open content that anyone can access.  I talked about RACHEL in my last post, and that is an amazing resource that I think will change education in the developing world because it requires no internet or even computer. To move forward, I truly believe we all need to work together to create more and more content in competition with the hegemonic publishers. 

Very few people go into education or research simply for the money.  However, the course seems to be advocating a complete lack of copyright restrictions on knowledge and I do not think that is right or fair.  There will be little motivation to create quality material if money is no longer a possibility and even less if they are set to lose money.  It can be expensive to create learnings materials. However, educators have a responsibility to consider students and their budgets in textbook decisions to and to create or provide high quality accessible (free) resources.  But we must not lose our legacy of acknowledging the original discoverers of knowledge, ideas and research.