I strengthen my skills as an Open Education Advocate

     As an Open Education practitioner and trainer, I believe that knowledge should be freely available and easily reachable, and shareable. Which can help to create a more equitable society promoting inclusiveness. As the Open Education movement principle guides, enhancing remixing of already existing educational material is the key to nurturing innovative pedagogies. As a trainer with freely available resources, I can always iterate on existing resources to create new and innovative training resources to engage participants in the workshops. Emphasizing practicing together or participating together might give birth to many innovative strategies. Collaboration in education is essential to build a strong, vibrant, and effective teaching-learning environment. Through the interchange of concepts, tools, and approaches, the results of teaching and learning may be significantly improved. 

 “Open Educational Resources (OERs) are any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license. The nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt, and re-share them. OERs range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video, and animation. ” (UNESCO)

    Creative Commons licenses allow authors to clearly describe/decide how they want their work to be used from more open to less open. Others can easily understand looking at the CC license logos on the resource as they clearly communicate to them on what permissions are granted to use that particular resource. This is possible when one understands the CC licenses and their permissions. 

    I recently took a CC Educators Certificate course. It was an enlightening journey. The structure of the course and well thought of engaging assignments facilitated a thorough understanding of the subject. It enhanced my knowledge of Open licenses and the reuse of existing openly licensed resources. Kudos to my facilitator Shanna Hollich for fostering a wonderful collaborative environment with thoughtful discussion prompts and guidance on submitted assignments with her expert comments. 

    I usually come across in training sessions from participants many questions about OER and Open Licenses. For example the ND license usage, about reuse of a CC-licensed work,  also the difference between remixes and collections and OER, open textbooks, open courses, and MOOCs. Now I feel more confident in my skills to answer these kinds of questions. I will use my assignments as resources to address these types of questions. 

    The challenge I used to face while creating OER with H5P technology which allows me to specify metadata clearly about the license of each element is when we use various CC licensed / Openly licensed resources inside a big resource, what license we have to give if we use CC BY SA work inside this. I think I understood well through the certificate course as it states that:-

• you are not required to apply a ShareAlike-license to your overall work if you are using an SA-licensed work within it;
• the ND restriction does not prevent you from using an ND-licensed work; and
• you can combine that CC-licensed material with other work as long as you attribute and comply with the NonCommercial restriction if it applies.

    The biggest challenge I see is having educators/faculty understand the concept of Open Pedagogy, the benefits of OER, and how Open Licenses help them share their work with others. Even knowing Open Licenses they might have many inhibitions to reusing openly licensed materials/resources thinking about copyrights and limitations. To address this challenge I will conduct open online courses and workshops and use my course assignments to answer many of their queries. (What is Creative Commons? The Purpose of Copyright, Anatomy of a CC License, and using CC Licenses and CC-Licensed Works, etc.) Also, I will give group discussions and group submission assignments fostering collaboration. Also, I will try to explain the fundamental principle of CC license 4.0 on usage of ND-licensed works and collection and remix differences as this was challenging to me while taking the CC Educators Certificate. 

    Another challenge I see is that not many educational resources are available in Indian regional languages. To address this challenge and to motivate educators to create OER in regional languages, I am planning to create a podcast series in bilingual mode explaining Open education, Open Licenses, and their benefits with examples. Along with Open Educational Practitioners' insights by inviting them to podcasts to address the community.