Welcome back. I hope you found something you could use in your teaching or research yesterday. Not to worry if you didn’t manage to get started. This is a very quick introductory course, so you can catch up in minutes.
Actually finding useful resources can be as much a task as making the resource when you first start to search for OER. Certainly for me there seemed to be more information telling us how amazing OERs are, than actual resources.
In today’s session we will explore the following:
- Tips on how to find resources by exploring OER search engines and repositories
- How to use OERs
- How to make your resources open, and why it would be a wonderful thing for you to do so.
Exploring the OER search engines, repositories and directories
Yesterday we mentioned iTunes U and the general video platforms like Vimeo and YouTube. We also looked at a great tool on the CC site tool – I hope you got chance to look and use that. There are, however, a number of organised areas set up to help you find and use these wonderful OER resources.
OER websites
- OER Commons for something related to your subject
- The University of Edinburgh OER site have a look at their recent articles, and their How to Guides
- Open University on iTunes
- Shakespeare: the downloads of images are incredible.
- Great writers inspire: with some incredible materials curated from sources all over the world.
- Creative Commons search tools is a fantastic way of searching for OERs that have been tagged under the Creative Commons use.
- Science and Engineering – some wonderful free diagrams and GIFs here.
- Open Education Consortium – general (although I found some useful Business and Law resources there)
- Yale Open Courses
- Wiki Commons is ‘a database of 31,495,482 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute‘
- Google Scholar – You’ve learned about Google Scholar before if you completed the first week of 5 Days of Digital Literacy. It’s an online, freely accessible search engine that lets users look for both physical and digital copies of articles. It searches a wide variety of sources, including academic publishers, universities, and preprint depositories looking for peer-reviewed articles.
- The University of Edinburgh has a useful list here.
- Core Materials
- Humbox
- There’s thousands of wonderful interactive science resources out there. Go and have a look and play with the interactive materials here. You will see the page will offer you the embed code, but you can test the resource by clicking on the URL like this one: http://www.core.materials.ac.uk/repository/alumatter/metallurgy/functional_apps/hyd-electrograining.swf
- Wiki Commons is ‘a database of 31,495,482 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute‘
TASK: Have a search for the same subject on the above repositories and pull together a group of resources you would find useful in your teaching. I had to drag myself away from a Yale course on Milton’s poetry from the Milton site. (It makes me think about the times I spent in bookshops in the early 90’s with pen and paper, trying to broaden my reading list for my English degree, and how things have opened up and changed for us all.)
The post a link to something you have found useful in the comments section of this blog post.
How to use OER
It would, I think, be stating the obvious that you can either share links to resources, or in many cases copy and paste the embed code given by many OERs into your VLE, web page etc. You could also invite your students to use the tools and sites mentioned in these sessions to find them for themselves. I like the idea of encouraging your students to search for, and share, the very best resources they come across.
Mixing it up
However, there is a little more to it than just downloading images and re-purposing test questions, for example, from various sources. It’s at this point where things get a little more involved – but believe me it’s worth it! Jump to 1 min on the follow video: Here’s the page for the Licence Chooser Here’s a wiki on how to apply your CC licence
How to make an OER
I invite you watch the following video on how to create OER. There’s some overlap with the previous video. OERs can be uploaded to the directories mentioned in the first part of this session, and/or hosted by the University/any platform and tagged appropriately. I think it’s important to see that it is not necessary to create an OER as such, if resources are already exist. But it is important to label them if you wish them to be used. Though there are ways of designing resources so they work well as OERs, it’s as much about labelling meta data and licences.
Accessibility:
I’ll admit, I’m kind of throwing this section in at the last minute, as I found a few really nice tools not only for checking OER accessibility, but checking your own course work, I think the first one is superb:
www.stemreader.org.uk – they’re looking for beta testers – it reads maths equations.
slidewiki.org – resources for making your OER or just you general course materials accessible.
www.pave-pdf.org/index.en.html – four steps to an accessible PDF
So why would you share?
Imagine what we might achieve if we shared, and contributed, and shared… Not only could we save ourselves time and money, we could help each other grow within the no only in the UK but further afield. Have a quick read of this webpage for more information.
I think this is wonderful: OER Africa
Conclusion:
I’m probably going over the 30 minute slot here, many apologies. Once you start looking at these things it is easy to become engrossed in some wonderful resources. Whether it’s watching TED ED lectures or playing around with the Flash files I showed you from Core Materials above, or viewing free Open University courses on iTunes. I very much hope you have found something within these two sessions to use in your teaching. I also hope you have been inspired to make some of your resources available. I think it might be useful for me to do another session looking at putting resources together using OERs and also how we make them.
Activity:
Please post a comment about something you have found interesting or useful in this course or related to OER.
Activity 2: I will forward on a survey to assess how useful you have found this introduction to OER. Please fill it out so I can continue to improve the course. Many thanks, Jason Williams