Open Educational Resources (OER) 

 Nowadays, the world is changing at a faster pace, than ever. We are setting foot in a world, where we all have to acquire new knowledge and skills on a nearly continuous basis. Moreover, the rising global demand for higher education requires more resources and skills to meet twenty-first-century learners' needs. Thus, over the past years, various initiatives have created different ways of providing education, and much of these initiatives has been enabled by the growth of the Internet, which has built a global “platform” that has dramatically expanded access to all sorts of resources, including informal and formal educational materials. Probably the most noticeable impact of the Internet on education has been the Open Educational Resources (OER), which has given free access to many courses and other educational materials to anyone who wants to use them. Furthermore, the OER as an open learning ecosystem provided both teachers and students with unlimited materials and resources. In other words, while traditional schools offer a limited number of courses of study, the “catalogue” of subjects that can be learned online is almost unlimited.  In addition,  for any topic that is of students interests, there is likely to be an online community to practice, who share that passion. 

Furthermore, as more of learning is becoming Internet-based, it will be beneficial for the EFL teachers in Armenia to explore the OER materials and resources and try to benefit from OER. In other words, teachers can make use of the already ready-made materials by adapting these materials to their students’ needs and level of proficiency. For instance,

Open Resources for English Language Teaching (ORELT) is an open portal (http://orelt.col.org/) which provides teachers in junior secondary schools (JSS) with a range of resources that teachers can adapt and use in the classrooms to promote effective communication among the students. Thus, the teachers can choose and modify any module or unit or section to suit the needs and circumstances of their students.

Commons  (https://www.oercommons.org/) is another open platform and teachers can benefit from it, as well.  Commons is an open version of the Foundation’s Gallery of Teaching and Learning (http://gallery.carnegiefoundation.org) which has been running for the past nine years. The Gallery provides an online example of case studies of successful learning and teaching projects. The Commons is an open forum that provides educators at all levels (from around the world) to post their own examples and participate in an ongoing conversation about effective and efficient teaching practices, as a means of supporting a process of “creating/ re-mixing/ using/re-mix/sharing). In other words, this forum will give the EFL teachers in Armenia the opportunity to gain practical advice and guidance on how to implement more effective and efficient ways in their teaching process. Namely, teachers can ask each other questions to clarify areas of uncertainty by hearing different answers to questions from other experts of the field. Thus,  such an environment might encourage teachers readily and happily pick up new knowledge and skills as the world shifts from traditional schooling to OER.