Open Educational Resources (OER): A training development tool or something less?

Image: OER by @visualthinkery, licensed CC-BY-SA remix by catherinecronin
https://open.teachingandlearning.ie/license-your-oer/

The Learning and Development team in my organization assembled virtual learning resources to provide continuous learning opportunities for supporting employees’ personal and career development journey. The organization has an extensive list of online courses to help employees work on a range of competencies such as conflict resolution, strategic thinking, leadership, collaboration, and more. Employees can also obtain development opportunities at their own pace via a self-served eLearning program called Bookboon. This platform includes more than 2000 short or bite-sized eBooks and audio titles under 13 different categories such as digitalization and IT, communication and presentation, and Microsoft office programs. Although the organization offers a wide array of learning options, many employees are not aware of their existence. Pontefract (2018) argued even if the employees come across a learning option, they are too busy to consume the learning and then apply it to their role. He also claimed that only about a third of the organization is engaged and willing to excel in their role. As a leader who provides training in my department, I am interested in exploring the irony of colleagues who complained about the lack of learning opportunities but also refrained from using the available learning resources because of a variety of reasons ranging from time constraint or other unspecified factors.   

The learning event that my team chose for this course was An Introduction of Open Educational Resources (OER) through OpenLearn (n.d.) at the Open University. I reckon this would be a great fit for my individual critical inquiry by understanding the definition and effectiveness of OER, and how these might determine employees’ decision on OER in the corporate training context. In this learning event, there is also an option of redesigning some OER material and examining the impact of the change on learners. Furthermore, I am interested in exploring questions such as the acceptance of OER or Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and which learning purposes or incentives would employees use OER or MOOCs (Egloffstein & Ifenthaler, 2017). I look forward to learning your experience or stories on OER or MOOCs. Were they useful for your personal and career development journey?

References

Egloffstein, M., & Ifenthaler, D. (2017). Employee Perspectives on MOOCs for Workplace Learning. TechTrends, 61(1), 65–70. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-016-0127-3

Pontefract, D. (2018, October 23). The no. 1 reason employees say they’ve stopped learning is because they don’t have time. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/danpontefract/2018/10/23/the-1-reason-employees-say-theyve-stopped-learning-is-because-they-dont-have-time/

The Open University. (n.d.). OpenLearn. https://www.open.edu/openlearn/