Topic Post 3

This week’s readings on Equity and Access were great and had a lot to unpack on, mainly touching on open pedagogy, digital redlining, access , privacy and design principles for indigenous learning spaces.

I really enjoyed the first reading, essentially giving a walkthrough on making open textbooks with students by introducing open educational resources. The author began by explaining that their intentions are to provide tools and techniques to those who want to build a more empowering, collaborative, and just architecture for learning, and defines open pedagogy as an approach to teaching with 3 sets of foundational values: autonomy and independence; freedom and responsibility; democracy and participation; which was all news to me.

The author mentions the “5 R’s” that should generally characterise open educational resources (OERs),  reusable, retainable, redistributable, revisable, and remix-able. Which i feel as though very well summarises the main fundamentals behind successful OERs, such as TED or Skillshare. All in all, there is a lot that goes behind making an  making open textbooks or open educational material in general, many questions you should ask yourself before publishing such content that i never considered whilst using these resources myself.

That being said, if the reader has some spare time i think this video would be fairly helpful in further breaking down the steps involved in making an OER and its importance.