The Open University - OpenLearn

SUMMARY

In this article, Santos, McAndrew, and Godwin discusses about OpenLearn, an Open Educational Resources (OER) website that provides free learning materials to people around the world. The Open University (OU) UK, which is one of the members of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, launched OpenLearn in 2006 as part of its initiative to provide free educational materials for learners worldwide. OpenLearn runs under the Moodle open-source learning management system. Similar to a real online course from a university, people can access OpenLearn on their personal computer and/or laptop. A wide range of subject areas are available for the visitors to choose and study on their own time. Some available topics include Arts and Humanities, Business and Management, and Education. Most of the available materials cover introductory level of the courses and anyone can go through each topic in about two hours. Some topics require about ten hours of completion time.

Any individual who has never taken an online course before can experience online learning through OpenLearn. There is a discussion board, tutoring assistant, journals, and other learning tools in each of the topic the person selects. Before any learner can access some of the contents such as the discussion board, the person must register for a login account. The authors note that one important aspect of OpenLearn is students get to learn while communicating and sharing ideas with others. This process allows them to be part of the learning communities. As Santos, McAndrew, and Godwin (2008) explains, “the idea behind the provision of a forum, attached to each unit, is to give the users the opportunity for social learning. They are able to start learning communities, if they wish,...

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...e first step in providing free education to these individuals as more and more learning resources become freely available in the coming future. The most important asset of OER is offering a free learning tool to K-12, college and adult students. The Internet has become a part of everyone’s life today and all you need is one computer with internet access to connect to these educational materials. Mobile devices such as laptop, cellular phone, and iPad are becoming part of the learning tools outside of a personal computer. If you have one of these tools then you will be able to take advantage of the materials being offered by OER.

Works Cited

Santos, A., McAndrew, P., & Godwin, S. (2008). Open educational resources - new directions

for technology-enhanced distance learning in the third millennium. The Open University. Retrieved from http://oro.open.ac.uk/23855/