Part 1: Getting to grips with OERs

This task focuses on issues involved in finding and repurposing OERs (searching for OERs, licensing, tagging etc.). It should help you start feeling more comfortable with the prospect of eventually creating and sharing your own OERs as part of the cascade process.

In the spirit of OER movement, we decided not to create a new resource from scratch –instead, we’ve mixed and matched a number of open resources together from The "How Tos" of OER Commons, a module created by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) and released on Connexions (Rice University OER repository).

We don’t want to prescribe how you should engage with these resources – depending on how much time you have and/or what your interests are, you can choose to engage (or not)  in the activities embedded within these modules and follow the attached links. At the very least, we would like you to look at the material in the OER Glossary  as well as the resources on finding OERs and licensing. When it comes to the resources posted on our project wiki (item 5), feel free to be selective and focus only on resources which you think are most relevant to your situation. 

Introduction to OERs

1. Why OER? (http://cnx.org/content/m15211/latest/)
2. OER Glossary  (http://cnx.org/content/m15223/latest/

Finding OERs

1. Finding OER Materials You Can Start Using Now (http://cnx.org/content/m15213/latest/)
2. OER Licensing and Conditions of Use (http://cnx.org/content/m15234/latest/)
3. Repurposing OERs (http://cascadeoer2.pbworks.com/w/page/Repurposing-OERs)

Task part 1: Your commentary

Finally, once you have familiarised yourself with the resources provided in this task, please post a short reflexive piece on this wiki page (using the comments feature) addressing the following questions:

• Look over the comments from the pre-meeting task: has your understanding of OERs changed, and if yes, how? Has your understanding of the concept of “openness” changed?

Part 2: Searching in OER collections

As we have mentioned, the OER projects are required to deposit their materials into JORUM, however most people new to OER are not familiar with the repository. Therefore it would be useful to spend some time searching and browsing, again our suggestion would be to start with issues outlined in your revised letter of support – for example, social science research methods is common to most of the partners. As a starting point it will be useful to simply begin browsing and get a feel for the types of materials and some of the problems in searching ‘accurately’ for items of relevance. The link again is: 

http://www.jorum.ac.uk/

Task part 2: Your commentary

Again, please post a short reflexive piece on this wiki page (using the comments feature) addressing the following questions:

• how ‘easy’ was it to find materials?
• was browsing or searching more effective?
• would it matter to you were the materials came from (the originator)?
• would you trust (and then re-use) some items over others?
• can you come to any general conclusions about the quality of the material you have discovered?
• would it be more effective to be able to search or browse according to:
• file types (video / document / audio / pdf etc)
• granularity (single item / multiple item / module / RLO etc)

If you were hypothetically (or in practice) at the point of re-designing a module or refreshing some of the content, would JORUM be a useful resource or would you look elsewhere?

If you have some more time, using similar search terms, take a look at some alternative OER collections and search engines, below are some ideas:

• MERLOT – www.merlot.org
• OER Recommender - http://www.oerrecommender.org/
• Open CourseWare finder - http://www.ocwfinder.org/
• DiscoverED - http://discovered.creativecommons.org/search/
• Global Learning Objects Brokered Exchange (GLOBE) alliance - http://www.globe-info.org/
• OER Commons http://www.oercommons.org/oer

Please do post any further comments about discoveries in any of the above collections, or how they contrast with JORUM – this doesn’t need to be in any detail, but it would be interesting to know if you felt that any of the other collections were easier to use or that the range / quality of suitable materials was more extensive. Also bear in mind that US based collections will most likely use slightly different terminology. 

And if you have even more time to spare… feel free to follow the OER-related conversations (“real” academics discussing the relevance of OERs to their practice!) which emerged in the context of Open Educational Resources seminar organised by SCOPE (Community of Practitioners in E-Learning at British Columbia Campus) which took place in January-February 2009:

1. How do you currently find OERs?
2. What does “open” mean to you?
3. Creating OERs – so… why?
4. Using other people’s work

You might also be interested in the newly (Jan 2011) released Wikiversity course on OERs as well as a resource developed by University of Nottingham in the context of their OER pilot programme.