Open Educational Resources in Schools of government
Open Educational Resources; Schools of government; Open Knowledge; Digital Educational Resources;
Tecnologia Educacional.
In recent decades, the State, movements organized by civil society, and multilateral organizations have supported and encouraged the production of educational materials and content in open and accessible formats. In Brazil, some public institutions that work with education produce and make available materials following this model called Open Educational Resources (OER). Schools of government are formal educational institutions whose main activity is the training and development of public agents. Some of them provide access to content with the aim of publicizing videos, e-books and presentations used in lectures that have educational content. The educational resources produced by most of these schools are developed and made available through a perspective of more rigid resources known as learning objects. This perspective goes against current policies of access, openness and transparency, such as open government, open data, open science and other initiatives that openly disclose materials produced and financed with public budgets. The overall objective of this study was to investigate the practices and perceptions regarding the use of OER in these government schools. This research is exploratory and was conducted with a qualitative approach using a literature review and a data collection method using two instruments: an online questionnaire and a survey of the official websites of the government schools surveyed. The data collected were described and interpreted based on three categories: knowledge about OER, practices with OER, and institutional policies to encourage the adoption of OER. The results suggest that the state schools that participated in the survey know basic characteristics of OER, are uncertain about the legal issues of copyright and alternatives for licensing and storage, and are interested in deepening their knowledge on these topics. As a technical product of the research, a proposal for actions will be presented to assist government schools in adopting a model for producing educational content in accordance with the premises of open educational resources.