What is Open Pedagogy and Open Educational Resources (OER)?
The first things that open pedagogy points me is z-library. I have download numbers of books from it. Open Pedagogy means using OER to support learning or the open sharing experiences to improve the skills or knowledge. It turns to a question, is z-library a OER? The answer will be: no.
| Z-Library | Real-OERs | |
| CCL or Open Access | no | yes |
| Content Types | Primarily books | Diverse(videos, quizzes, modules, etc.) |
| Customization | Unable | Able |
| Legality | Copyright issues | Legally accessible and shareable |
OERs are free teaching and learning materials that are licensed to allow modification and reuse. They can be completely separate textbooks, videos, quizzes, learning modules, etc. However, z-library have no license such as Creative Commons Licensing or Digital Peer Publishing Licences. It means it’s not only illegal it’s also not OER compliant.
Further, the z-library can provide resources that enable students to construct knowledge through independent learning, practice and reflection, thus generating knowledge in the process of solving real-world problems, thus achieving the goal of open pedagogy to help students and educators create and share knowledge. On the other hand, however, the complexity of z-library’s sources and the single type of content do not allow for editing, customization, and collaboration, and do not satisfy the full purpose of open pedagogy.
Why Creative Commons Licensing(CCL) is so important?
Through the z-library, I understand the importance of CCL. The legitimacy of educational resources ensures the rights of the creators and encourages the sustainability of the resources. Z-library’s single resource model, which is almost exclusively books, does not ensure that Student-Centered Learning is also not able to adapt and customization of learning materials.
Global Trends in OER
This is OER website design for providing more and better choices for Chinese users worldwide. Native language resources is an important trend in global OER, and native language learning tends to be more efficient than second language learning. However, this also poses a challenge to the quality and quantity of OER, as the productivity of a single platform is hardly enough to cover mass demand.