Students should never have to decide between buying a textbook for a class or eating. But they often do.
---Jesse Stommel
As a college student, textbooks should be used as a tool to assist me in my study and bring me convenience. But now, the prices of textbooks always make me stressful. Comparing with expensive paper textbooks, the relatively inexpensive electronic versions, even with some limitations, tend to be my choice when I have to choose to buy one of them. And when I knew that the prices of textbooks had risen by 1000% over the past 40 years, which is three times the inflation rate, I began to be interested in Open Education Resource(OER).
In my daily study, I sometimes participate in editing of some educational materials. Since my major is computer science, I often make websites, programming, design user interface and so on with my colleagues. Some of these materials will be left in some online communities for future learners to refer to, or will be presented to other learners by professors. One of my most commonly used Online Open Education Resource platform is called GitHub.
GitHub People use GitHub to build some of the most advanced technologies in the world. Whether you’re visualizing data or building a new game, there’s a whole community and set of tools on GitHub that can help you do it even better. GitHub includes tons of materials that can be used in most of the Computer Science courses. And learners can apply for permission to edit the materials to upgrade or find out the bugs. Learners can leave comments to each other or on the edits so that they can share ideas about what should be done and what should not. Most of the materials are free to view and are able to apply for edit. Since GitHub saves recent updates, so that users will always have the safe version to use, in case Some people deliberately makes trouble.
From the above description, I think GitHub is a perfect learning platform in line with the eight attributes of open pedagogy.
Figure 1
After study this unit, I would like to learn more about how to use the experience of GitHub in Computer Science field into other subjects. How to create a platform like GitHub that could providing learners with a large number of meaningful and free materials and let learners participate in the production of materials at the same time, in order to improve learners’ understanding and practice of knowledge. This sense of participation will also be transformed into the motivation for learners to continue learning.
Link:
Textbooks, OER, and the Need for Open Pedagogy:https://criticaldigitalpedagogy.pressbooks.com/chapter/textbooks-oer-and-the-need-for-open-pedagogy/
Figure 1: https://wordpress.viu.ca/enhancingpersonalizedlearning/2017/09/12/design-attributes-of-open-pedagogy-by-bronwyn-hegarty/