What will be the effects of open education movement upon high school education?

This week I prefer to answer at this question, because I'd want to starts from my experience and analyse what could be better for my work context. I'm high school teacher (not english one :-)) so when I began this course I hoped to have some more informations about OER movement to give a choice to my school that I see, deeply in crisis. Now I try to explain some hot points that OER could solves or at least, improve.

• Our Governments, in the last ten years, have furnished the schools of PC, networks, software without making an appropriate training for teachers. Well, that is not totally true, but it  was addressed to the sw app learning, (MS Office) for example. Only few people, less then 10% of teachers, attended to these courses against a big expense of money. So I can see, in my school, PC laboratories empty and the didactics hasn't changed. Better saied: students use PC to learn sw app. :-) Is  very far the idea to learn with PC and internet.  That's it make me think a business in PC selling,  Computer Licence selling, without creating an effective intervention on cultural changing in the didactical field. So OER can  improve this situation. The introduction of free and open sw could help the exit from this vicious circle. Anyway remain the strong illetteracy of teachers who are convinced, by now,  of the exclusive techical use of the informatic tools. Also new generations of teachers, who studied in special  university courses , don't know enough on the matter. (Yesterday I have talked with my young collegue who reject the concept to facilitate the study with ICT tools!. She said that study is synonim of effort. I answered: "do you want to see my face when I'm doing Open Ed tasks?:-) But it's better then swimming cost to cost from Italy to U.S.A, or speaking with my collegues by phone, or searching resources in a far library". I stayed asthonisched!)  . So OER could be a privileged way to change didactical methods, If people want it, of course.  I think that we need more efforts and time, alas, before seeing a massive sharing in this direction.

• School books: another big source of business. I've got two daughters, Francesca and Camilla, one is 23, the other is 19. Now they'are attending university but when they were in hight school we spent every year about  600,00€ of school books that:
  • was used only for the 20% of their pages;
  • was'nt used from Francesca to Camilla because the authors or the edition was changed;
  • nobody want these books, also for free;
  • now they're good only to make fire into my hearth.

So I think about families who cannot spend money every year for their children. In most cases are money thrown away. I'm, as well as many families, very tired to go along with this cultural consumerism. I think teachers, or generally schools, could make a reflexion about school books. In the last years they're becoming more expansive and I think that editorial lobbies push stongly against the ICT cultural opportunity for  teachers and students. So the national media, in particular TV, shoot on computer technology every time they can. What can school and teachers do? At first I invite to make OER or LOs and, how I expressed in last posts, every teacher or group of them could learn to prepare their learning resources. In the best way, they could exchange them too; our open ed community have written extensively about this topic. Teacher, morover, must become researchers. They, at first, must find and build their learning resources. I don't know how can they use a book written by others for neutral context! In fact they don't use school books but an huge mass of photocopies, doubleing the cost of the knowledge.

• Private lessons: this is an italian bad tradition, and it's a business too. Most of our high school students attend the public school in the morning and the private courses (not institutional) in the afternoon. That's why  many reason and causes that , now, I don't list. But families must spend money! Our Education Office spend, for example in my school, about 30.000,00 € every year to organize courses for students for their learning gap recover. My collegues and I think that these are not effective solutions, as an alternative schools could create a network of permanent services to recover learning online. This could allows to save time and money for the administration funds and families. I fortunately met collegues who started to do it and shareing their learning products.

 I wouldn't give you a catastrophic painting of italian school, but the problems I showed you are realistic and my friends (italian Open Ed community) and I would to spread some opportunities about OER and their employment in our country context. We're just conscious that the acceptance of the OER thoughts is, over all, a cultural concept.

Emanuela Zibordi