One of the articles that I have read this week was “Giving knowledge for free: The emergence of open educational resources”. I found an interesting part in this report:
The article pointed out that there is a significant imbalance between the “provision of OER and its utilization”. It said that most of OER is composed of English and based on Western culture. Accordingly, developing countries have limitation of using OER as consumers of it. However, the article also noted that some developing countries are constructing an increasing number of projects to build OER based on their own languages and cultures.
After reading this part, I was suddenly curious that if there were some kinds of OER available to anyone who needs it in Korea. So, I searched for open educational resources in Korea and I found three official sites regarding OER.
The first one is known as Korea Open Courseware (KOCW): www.kocw.net. Korea Education and Research Information Service (KERIS) is running the KOCW site. This site is offering a number of free educational resources from colleges and universities in Korea and even other countries. The second one is that SookMyung Women’s University has a web site called ‘Open Knowledge Share Dreams (SNOW)’: www.snow.or.kr, which offering free lectures and free educational resources from universities in Korea and around the world. The last one is University of Ulsan: http://open.ulsan.ac.kr. They are providing their own institution’s lectures for free via World Wide Web; it is about 5-6 courses in a semester.
I could see that Korea has realized the importance of OER and developing it. I was very excited about that. I hope more colleges and universities will participate in OER in the near future and give opportunities to students who cannot afford expensive higher education but want to benefit from it.
It is nice to see that even though the Western world (the US) is the dominate force in OER that is not stopping others, but rather helping them move forward in their own goals of getting OER for their people. However, I have to stop and wonder if some countries (like many that are on the news lately) are not getting OER together their countries because they want to leave their citizens ignorant and repressed.
ReplyDelete