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OER?

Image retreived from MaxPixel under CC0 licence
Among many important issues that we have considered under the topic 2 (ONL Course), my particular interest was raised by Open Educational Resources (OER) of which I had a very vague idea before.

What are OER: "teaching, learning or research materials that are in the public domain or released with an intellectual property license that allows for free use, adaptation and distribution" [1]. I like this idea very much. Why...? Something that stayed in my mind after revising this topic, are our Moderator's words: How much from what you wrote/created during your work was actually made only of your original thoughts? Well, very little...so why not to share? Of course, like with every breakthrough concept, there are some controversies, sensitive problems (e.g. whether to share someone's "know how", how to protect materials from improper/dishonest usage, the quality of prepared materials, credibility issues). But, it's like in real life, just the scope of some problems may be different. Some key issues connected with OER were collected in the guidline developed by UNESCO and Commonwealth of Learning [2].

If anyone had asked me where to find OERs, before I joined the ONL course, I would not know where to look. I believe that may be a case for some of you, so let me share some interesting sites I found, and shortly tell you what kind of resources you may find there.

Where to find open teaching materials? OER Commons is an example of public digital library [3]. We can find textbooks, lesson plans, learning strategies, interactive courses and others there, on very broad topic spectrum. In this catologue [4], OER for higher education are gathered. Some higher education institutions are also establising their own open courses [e.g. 5,6]. My personal interest lay in the area of marine microbiology, so I tried to find some examples of open educational resources in this field. And yes, there are some, e.g. microbiology textbooks [7,8]. I also spoted this amazing Ocean MOOC (massive online course)[9], created by well-known scientific institutions, clearly designed with high quality materials, a nice example. In a brand new study by Petersen and McLaughlin (2017), I found a working example of development of OER microbiology lab manual. The aim of the Authors was to create a custom, easily accessible, open laboratory manual.  Students feedback were taken into account during the process. As stated by the Authors, Students' satisfaction was very high. The authors received many valuable comments on improving the transcendence and quality of the manual they created.

To conclude, there are so many already existing OER, we just need the time to dig in and pick them out and maybe try to contribute somehow :) 


References:

1. Retrieved from: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/access-to-  knowledge/open-educational-resources/ (accessed on 9th November 2017)
2. Guidelines for Open Educational Resources (OER) in Higher Education, Paris, UNESCO; Vancouver, COL, 2015
3. https://www.oercommons.org/
4. http://openeduc.wixsite.com/opened
5. https://openstax.org/about
6. https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
7. Download for free at https://openstax.org/details/books/microbiology
8. Boundless Microbiology retreived from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless- microbiology/
9. http://www.oceanmooc.org/en/index.php
10. Petersen J., McLaughlin S.K., 2017, Design and Revision of an Open-Educational Resource  Microbiology Lab Manual Using Student Feedback, JOURNAL OF MICROBIOLOGY &    BIOLOGY EDUCATION DOI: https://doi.org/10.1128/jmbe.v18i2.130


Komentarze

  1. Alastair Creelman12 listopada 2017 13:16

    Indeed there is a lot of resources out there but teachers need help to find them. A clear role for our libraries perhaps?

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  2. Unknown27 listopada 2017 01:50

    Would be great, however it's not practiced by our library. Maybe it's an idea for small libraries at the faculties...

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  3. Unknown21 grudnia 2017 05:01

    " How much from what you wrote/created during your work was actually made only of your original thoughts? " - it's a good argument for sharing of your own knowledge

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