Open Educational Resources - Amazon Web Services



SCORE Fellows Open Educational Resources (OER) Workshop

What are they?

"Digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research" (OECD, 2007).

Why use them?

• Quality can be improved and the cost of content development reduced by sharing and reusing.

• There's a need to look for new models of module production and presentation.

• They can speed up the development of new learning resources, stimulate internal improvement, innovation and reuse.

• Because of the flexibility of OER materials, you can make them relevant to your needs.

The JISC Open Educational Resources infoKit[1] gives more information about the benefits of using OERs.

OER Handbook for Educators[2] is also a useful starting point.

Where can I find them?

General ‘Repositories’ or Collections

• Cloudworks: Links to OER repositories [3]

• OpenLearn (labspace)[4]

• Jorum[5]

• OER Commons[6]

• 100 Best Open Educational Resources on the Web[7]

Open Educational Resources Search Engines

JISC Infonet OER toolkit lists links to specialist search engines[8]

and the UNESCO OER toolkit which lists specialist search engines, and general repositories[9] Another useful resource is the OER Recommender[10]

How do I evaluate them?

Important attributes of quality OERs include:-

• Accuracy

• Reputation of author/institution

• Standard of technical production

• Accessibility

• Fitness for purpose

• Clear rights declarations e.g. Creative Commons

If you would like to explore more issues around quality visit the JISC Open Educational Resources infoKit quality considerations[11] web page.

The accompanying checklist at the end of this document is provided to prompt you to consider some key issues to think about when evaluating OERs. The checklist covers potential areas to consider particularly when selecting OERs for reuse.

Examples of good practice

If you want to quickly view some good examples here are links to the recent top three winning entries for the JORUM Learning and Teaching Competition 2010:

1st Place: The molecular basis of photosynthesis.

Submitted by Katy Jordan, University of Cambridge.



2nd Place: The Open Dementia E-Learning Programme: Living with dementia.

Submitted by Colin Paton, Social Care Institute for Excellence



3rd Place: Making the creative process visible.

Submitted by Dr Natasha Mayo, University Wales Institute, Cardiff



How can I use them?

OER projects make use of open licenses in which the author retains copyright but can specify clearly which rights he or she is prepared to share with users of the work.

Creative Commons are the most common type of licenses which all require that a user give credit to the original author and allow use and distribution of the resource. Some Creative Commons licenses are more restrictive and, for example, do not allow modification of a work to create a derivative work, or commercial use. Licenses that include a "Share Alike" condition require that any derivative works are licensed under the same open license.

Want to know more?

You may find this series of tutorials from OER Commons[12] useful.

This short Information Literacy activity[13] on ‘Finding images and copyright’, provides an overview of issues relating to finding and incorporating images within academic work, as well as providing some pointers for finding copyright cleared images online.

Workshop Activity:

1) Choose at least two of the OER search engines listed on the JISC OER InfoKit

to locate an OER on a subject or topic of your own choosing.

2) Apply the checklist below to record your evaluation of your chosen OER?

3) Discuss with workshop participants how easy and pragmatic your chosen OER would be to adapt and reuse for your own teaching and learning contexts.

Content for this resource was repurposed from material originally developed by The Open University Library Services used to promote the potential use of OER in module development within the organization.

This resource is licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Share Alike

Non Scantlebury

The Open University Library Services

6th December 2010

Quality checklist for Open Educational Resources

Here are some things you might want to consider when selecting Open Educational Resources for reuse. You can use this form to record your findings.

| |Comments |Score 1 – 5 |

| | |(1=low 5=high) |

|Content | | |

|Relevant, accurate, appropriate level of detail, objective, current, jargon-free | | |

|Good provenance (consider reputation of author/institution), list of references if appropriate | | |

|Free of advertising | | |

| | | |

| | | |

| | | |

|Pedagogy | | |

|Learning outcomes stated and match with learner’s needs | | |

|Engaging, interactive | | |

|Appropriate level, any prerequisite skills / understandings stated | | |

|Time required to study is stated and equates to importance of learning outcomes achieved | | |

| | | |

| | | |

| | | |

| | | |

| | | |

| | | |

|Usability / Accessibility | | |

|Easy to use, well presented, clear navigation | | |

|Accessible for users with disabilities and conforms to accessibility guidance | | |

| | | |

| | | |

| | | |

|Reuse | | |

|Standalone resource that can be reused in different contexts | | |

|Robust, functional, works on different browsers/platforms | | |

|Rights are fully documented (Creative Commons or other rights statement) Is it OK to reuse it? | | |

|Are there any conditions? | | |

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