At many higher education institutions, the permissions process is usually handled by the copyright office or the institutional library. As such, many academics don’t realize the time and cost associated with licensing permissions to use all rights reserved materials.
Thanks for sharing!
Open in education is an important concept. It allows everyone who are keen to learn, to have acess to information and knowledge and therefore can contribute to generate new ideas and discoveries around the world.
Education is a right to all regarding of social status so educational resources should be open and sharable to all as much as possible.
In education & research collaboration for me is more important than competition. Knowing that educators and researchers are usually paid by public money (yours and everyone’s money), their work or publication should belong to the public and should be accessible for free. I am happy to pay a bit more of taxes from my income (as I think I already do for maintaining community libraries) to ensure the database for these research paper is maintained and secured properly… and maybe this is what Sci-Hub is trying to achieve… Are they using blockchain technology?
Well said, especially in these COVID19 times, working together, we can respond to this crisis more effectively than if we each work alone.
Use of the concept ‘OPEN’ in education especially in a digital age is a milestone. Open learning contributes to the fundamental rights of human beings that is education. without any traditional barriers, an individual can learn as per his or her requirement and can develop himself as an ideal person to promote this open learning in the society. Open learning is a boost in education and its a requirement of a digital age.
I am working as a Principal of a school and a researcher as well.I feel without Open resources and open access to the technology.its not possible to gain proper knowledge.
Open matters because it gives the opportunity to broaden our horizon of learning
This question comes at an interesting time- we have access to a lot of databases due to the Corona Virus experience. I therefore do agree that open matters for learning. The opened databases has allowed a number of people to access documents they would otherwise would not have access to and thus making it easier to conduct research and expand on the knowledge that one has.
In terms of OERs- personally believe that making one’s teaching resources available helps the other in coming up with the best way to conduct the course.
Thank you.
Hi @marthamosha
It’s great to see so many organisations opening up access to resources during the pandemic.
I hope that these organisations will retain these levels of access to knowledge after the pandemic and consider removing “all rights reserved” copyright by applying open licenses so that together we can build more sustainable education futures for all.
Welcome to LiDA103!
Definitely Open matters a lot to gain maximum knowledge in minimum time and to get benifits from others experiences in a legal way. OER and Creative Commons make this path smooth and easy.
Open matters for me because equity matters. I have been involved in a number of educational projects in South American & east African countries & I’ve had the privilege of working with so many brilliant, hard-working & dedicated people. It offends me that they are denied access to important, useful research. I’m not at all sure that knowledge is a commodity which should only be bought & sold.
What can we learn from the current state of affairs regarding access to scholarly knowledge? I think we need to appreciate the complexity of the scientific publishing business. It can’t be dismantled or opened up simply by providing an open-access publishing site. We also need to address the ‘prestige journal’ problem, the need for peer reviewers, & the bias in what gets published.
Equity does matter - sadly, many of our public funded higher education institutions continue to create artificial scarcity using public money to produce all rights reserved courses, without sharing freely.
Learning is something that should be associated with positive feeling, positive thinking. Sadly, for a lot of people “learning” is a privilege, for the “Happy Few”, the not so happy, cannot afford it. Suddenly, Learning is about power and discrimination.
In a digital age, for the people who have access to the knowledge - whatever knowledge they want or whenever they want to - it is very “handy”, almost taken for granted, maybe?
I was lucky. My parents worked 7 days a week and from dawn to dust, to give me the opportunity to learn and to thrive in a digital world. So while I don’t take it for granted, I am not as affected as the people who are no as lucky as I was/am.
The subject: “Why open matters for learning in a digital age” makes me reflect on the different level of “openness”. What do we mean by “open”?
I believe that the main issue regarding learning in the digital age is the cost of the materials and OER would be a saviour in that case.
Naleen
Hello!
This is a very interesting question. I would say that open matters for learning in a digital age because we education for everyone is a sustainable development goals. It means that the world will be a better place if everyone have access to educational resources. In this context, I have a special focus on cultural institutions, especially heritage institutions. These institutions have evidence of the history of all communities that humankind ever known. These evidences are the pieces to develop the history of our communities and will educate all human being but all the education contents made in heritage institutions are not clearly open. They are supposed to because they are funded by public money but they are not clearly identified as open education resources, which is for me a big fail in our system. Of course, we have plenty of other institutions such as universities and schools that have a non-well-adapted copyright system to digital age… Another story 
Open matters for me personally because I believe everyone has a right to education, at whatever stage in life they may be.
I get frustrated with access (or lack of!) to scholarly knowledge when I am trying to find articles, for example, only to see that they are hidden behind a paywall. Similarly, as an early career researcher, my preference would always be to publish with open access. If an open access journal does not exist in your particular field, then you have to choose between either paying astronomical fees to ensure free access to readers, or publishing for free which then means readers have to pay. Neither of these situations are desirable!
Hi Joelle, I agree completely that learning shouldn’t be about power and discrimination - well said!
Hi Camille, your particular focus on cultural and heritage institutions sounds really interesting. I look forward to learning more about this context as we work through the course
If knowledge is not being shared it is therefore useless. The value of knowledge is when it is being utilized and used for other purposes. Open resources help learners to get vast information necessary to their learning.
Although there are institutions and organizations that openly share their content, still majority of those asking for certain fees. What if learners could not afford to pay for such? How can we motivate them to dig deeper for essential knowledge?
For me, the government should consider the readiness of education institutions for open source of data instead of pouring so much amount for printed materials that usually set aside due to digital resources.
Yes, open education resources matters to me personally. I am an educator and require access to information at different levels for teaching. However, it is costly here in developing world to get resources for teaching. We appreciate the open access books that have really helped. Open access to important information is key moving forward. Thanks for organizing this training.
Open matters because I believe education should be accessible and free for everybody and because knowledge is made to be shared. We can make the world a better place with education. And there is a tendency of openess with the digital age, as we read in the article about sci-hub. Ten years ago I used to go to the library more often. Nowadays I can find a library inside my PC. Why buying books and filling shelves if we can access them in just one click? Digitalized resources are more sustainable.