I’ve been home from Australia for 1.5 weeks and it’s been a whirlwind of activity to prepare and begin to deliver my courses this semester. However, today I had time to attend one of the many workshops that were provided in the last few weeks by Center for Innovation and Excellence at VIU. The workshop I attended was an Introduction to Open Education Resources by Michael Paskevicius. The presentation is available on slideshare. As a researcher in the area of social media and education I thought I was fairly savvy about educational resources available on the internet, but in the course of this workshop I learned about a lot of new sites and resources that I hope to use on a regular basis in my research and in my teaching. I learned a lot about why educators should share resources, how we can share, and some useful tools for sharing.
Here are some of the things I learned:
- Everything that I write on the internet is, by default, copyrighted with all rights reserved to me. As an educator who believes in improving collaboration and connectivity between students, educators and the community, I aim to share and make public as much of my work as possible. I find that I’ve very good at this when I give research talks or professional development workshops. However, when it comes to the materials I use in my teaching I usually only get to the point where I share the materials with my students. I don’t usually take it one step further and share with the public. I hope to do more of this in the future, perhaps through my blog. For now, what I’m going to do is make sure that my blog is very open and shareable. So I’ve licensed my site with the most open creative commons license. It’s very easy following instructions at this link. Something that is very interesting about the creative commons badges that you can insert into your site is that they are now coded so that search engines can find openly licensed sites. I think that’s very cool!
- Open Education Resources (OER) are resources such as educational curriculum, materials or mixed media which are discoverable online, openly licensed and can legally be used by anyone to repurpose/improve and redistribute. When you’re considering creating OE resources it is important to consider copyright issues, formatting for the web and accessibility for reuse, careful addition of descriptive metadata (so it can be found by search engines) and where to publish.
- MIT’s Open Courseware project is one of the oldest OER projects. Although it is very well known and students have talked about it a lot in my focus group sessions about what social media resources students use to support their physics learning, I haven’t actually ever checked it out. Not surprisingly the course listings are extensive and well organized, each course may have lecture notes, assignments and solutions, online textbooks, projects and examples, exams and solutions, images, multimedia content or a study group! I noticed that the physics course list is very complete (every courses I ever took as a physics major) and well resourced (lecture notes, videos etc..) but biology courses had more study groups. Maybe I’ll use this resource to take a statistics course one day…I’ve been meaning to brush up on that for research purposes.
- The UK’s Open University has a LabSpace where resources from several universities/institutions are gathered and you can import materials organized in a learning management system into the learning management system that is used at your institution.
- Most YouTube videos, used widely by elementary, secondary and post secondary teachers everywhere are actually not licensed for public performance, only for private viewing. So legally teachers can currently provide links to YouTube videos, but shouldn’t show them in their classes. There are some big changes to copyright laws (The Copyright Modernization Act) in Canada in the works right now, so this is likely going to change soon! Also in the last 3-4 months YouTube has introduced an option to openly license your video with creative commons when you upload it, so hopefully past videos will be updated with licensing information as well. However Ted Talks 🙂 and Khan Academy videos 🙁 are open access.
- I learned about a variety of places to find and share OER resources such as the Open Courseware Consortium (compiles online courses from across institutions), Connexions (build, share or view online textbooks), Siyavula (open science textbooks for Grades 10-12, soon to have workbooks for all subjects and grades) and Academic Earth (aggregated video). Academic Earth brings together video from ‘the world’s top universities and scholars’, but they also include ‘Education Partners’ which includes the Khan Academy and other private education organizations. Something I’m not totally thrilled about. If you search for physics, the Khan Academy course is 7th in popularity, just behind courses from MIT, Yale and Stanford.
- Finding open access media can be challenging. I’ve been trying to be really good about using pictures on my blog that I have the right to use. Wikimedia is a site that pulls together all the media (pictures, video…) on wikipedia and makes it easily searchable; and it’s all open access. For pictures, Compfight was reccomended. But the funnest thing I learned about was the Openattribute browser plug in that senses when you’re on a site with open content and with one click will tell you how to attribute the material, providing the text for quick copy and paste. This will be an invaluable tool as I continue to blog.
So this has been a very long blog post, so needless to say my eyes were opened to OER and I look forward to exploring these sites further, to contributing and to promoting an ethic of OER in teacher education courses.