Employing open educational resources (OER) to facilitate sustainable online ‘communities of practice’ for vocational education and training (VET)
Ricky Yuk-kwan Ng and Annie Winnie Cheng
Vocational Training Council
Hong Kong SAR, China
Although the concept of open educational resources (OER) has gradually been accepted by higher education institutions after the Paris OER Declaration (UNESCO, 2012), this is a relatively new area to the vocational education and training (VET) sector. Traditional education focuses on the contemplation of academic concepts, but VET emphasizes the mastery of hands-on skills and ‘the teaching content of higher vocational education is much more complex and cannot be completely resolved by the general theories contained in general pedagogy’ (Pan, 2007, p. 16). Unlike most of the OER developed by higher education institutions, VET’s OER requires a large amount of demonstration, practice and interactivity for its specific needs. Furthermore, ‘situated activity’ is an important feature of VET, implying that learning takes place through participation in ‘communities of practice’ that are formed by groups of trade-specific practitioners and experts (Wenger, 1991; Mullin, 2013). Learning is a social process in which learners participate in the lived-in world where authentic, trade-specific and generic competencies, such as communication, teamwork, problem-solving and transferability happen (Merrienboer, 2001; Rauner & Maclean, 2008; Bank, 2013; Avis, 2014). For the above reasons, VET depends heavily on workshop practices and industrial attachments rather than lectures, literature reviews and tutorials, and therefore the development of trade-specific OER remains a challenge. In articulating the concept of OER, this paper proposes an interactive self-sustainable online platform for ‘communities of practice’ to accommodate the specific needs of developing OER for VET. The suggested platform aims to accompany the trade-specific OER with effective e-learning and technologies to enable VET learners, teachers and mentors to co-develop and share learning and teaching materials and practices. This study revealed a need to consider the instructional, practical and technological aspects in developing OER for VET. In addition, the willingness to share trade-specific contents among stakeholders is a hurdle.