Open
Educational Resources (OER)
By Prof. Jonathan Acuña Solano
Monday, July 6, 2015
Twitter: @jonacuso
Post
179
During an ELT Master’s Degree
Program course at Universidad Latina (Costa Rica) labeled as Learning & Teaching Resources around
June-July 2015, Prof. Fressy Aguilar asked participants, as part of the course
goals, to design, develop, and assemble a complete module for a virtual course
on Moodle. The task does not seem to be hard to achieve, but it does imply
several steps that must be pursued to ensure quality.
Though Prof. Aguilar’s course does
not exactly account for instructional design, some notions in this area are
worthwhile having to get a quality product. Among those notions, comprehending
the scope in use of Open Educational Resources is decisive and can help
teaching staff to create more interactive and attractive learning tasks for
students in a virtual environment such a Moodle. As soon as the assembly of the
course module was over, the instructor presented us with the following task to
reflect on what we had just built for our Moodle modules of the courses we had
decided to virtualize.
Prof. Aguilar’s Reflective Task
On Open Educational Resources
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Open Educational
Resources are any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with
an open license. The
nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally
and freely copy, use, adapt and re-share them.
In this context, "… OER are teaching, learning, and
research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released
under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and
re-purposing by others. Open educational
resources include full
courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests,
software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support
access to knowledge ….”
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As
part of my assembly of a module for a hybrid course on reading skills on
Moodle, I actually created 3 weeks or modules for that course. And this is what
my instructional design plan is:
Click Pictures to enlarge them!
However, as soon as all these
pieces were put together is when, our instructor had us reflect on the OERs
that were used for the assembling of the three weeks I produced. Here you have
the OERs I utilized, the plan will tell you how they will be used, and you also
had here the reason why they were chosen.
Why
I did choose it
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It is a
website that allows users to create quizzes that can also be embedded and
displayed in Moodle or other sites.
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It is
an extension part of the Google family that allows users to publish content
on the web for free.
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It is
an extension of the Google family that allows users to spot tutorial that can
be easily embedded in Moodle or wikis.
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It is a
site where users can create interactive posters that can be shown in class or
embedded in blogs, Moodle, etc.
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In brief, Prof. Aguilar had a very clear point in having us course participants to reflect upon the choice of OERs. If a resource is going to be used, there must be a good reason for doing so since it will contribute to the course success and the fostering of deep learning among students. Web 2.0 tools can indeed help the delivery of a course if used properly; the wrong and unscrupulous usage of OERs can lead course participants to failure if not planned thoroughly bearing in mind the plan’s objective to be accomplished.
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