Highlights from Seminar 1 (10/6): OER Fundamentals

Great working with everyone last Friday. It was really interesting to learn a bit more about your motivations behind transitioning to OER. Some included the desire to integrate materials that are more relevant to students’ daily lives, to address textbook costs, to improve course coordination, and access to / dissemination of materials.

Slides from the first seminar are available here.

See the link to the Creative Commons’ search filter that Junior mentioned: https://search.creativecommons.org/

And below documents our notes as we considered what makes a successful OER.

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Highlights from Seminar 3: Designing your OER

Finally posting materials from our third seminar! Thanks for some great discussions – hope these resources will stimulate further inquiry/dialogue.

Card sort activity notes

Here’s a list of possible menu items generated while brainstorming-

About
Assignments (listed twice)
Assignments + Resources for assignments
Course outline
Course overview
Weekly course outline
Grading policies
Links
Modules
Policies
Readings
Reflective writing
Requirements
Research
Resources (listed twice)
Syllabus
Syllabus / Course outline
Tips for success

Plus Michael and Lisa’s notes on questions students likely want answers to:

-What am I supposed to do?
-When is it due?
-How am I doing?

Click on the images below to enlargepicture of group notes

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Highlights from Seminar 2: Selecting resources & Licensing

Following up here with documentation relevant to today’s seminar. Also, if you’d like assistance embedding a CC license into the footer of your OER site, see the OpenLab workshop/office hours and/or check out the resources on the “Help” tab on the OpenLab’s main menu.

  1. Lecture slides from the second seminar are available here.
  2. Download the seminar activity worksheet
  3. Fellows mentioned several digital resources that can be useful for finding course content
    picture of group notes
  4. Notes for adopting existing resources and creating your own resourcespicture of group notes
  5. Diagramming what “category” our resources fall into (based on worksheet)…yay no copyright violations here!picture of group notes

 

Highlights from Seminar 1: OER Fundamentals

Great working with everyone today! Following up with a couple threads that seem useful to document here.

Slides from the first seminar are available here.

Below are some notes we generated on what makes a successful OER and some things to watch out for as we search for resources to use and begin to generate our own OERs.

picture of group notes

picture of group notes

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See you all next Friday!

Chronicle article, “Students Shouldn’t Have to Choose Between Books and Food”

hi everyone: I thought I’d share this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education with you. The article reminds us that many of our students are incredibly vulnerable. Textbook expenses are another, often untenable, burden in their lives.

Copy Write posting

Although the video makes light of copy write law it is important to respect the content of any authors works.

The fact that copy write law exist to protect an author’s work means we need to work hard and trace all content to its original source before posting It will be important for all of us to understand and give credit to those willing to share content via creative commons or other OER sites. I plan to extensively research my content before posting.

 

 

OER & Copyright Provocation

Copyright (as it was initially conceived) shares a common purpose with education: “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.” However, as Gray’s video illustrates, increasingly stringent copyright laws impost limits on how we access, use, and share information. Copyright restrictions also effect how much resources cost to access or use in different contexts.

Do issues of copyright, ease of access, and / or cost impact which materials you typically use in your courses?  

How might the use of open materials change the way you and your students use and share resources or impact your teaching?

Looking at “Ancient Medicine: The Classical Roots of the Medical Humanities”

2/12/2016
OER Fellowship
First assignment

Looking at the site: Ancient Medicine: The Classical Roots of the Medical Humanities

General Impressions

The first thing I notice are the beautiful visuals. Clearly there are advantages over Blackboard for customizing the site. The “Gallery” menu has more great pics, and not all from the “Classical” Greco-Roman period but Medieval, Renaissance, Egyptian, Indian, Eastern, etc. Images are sourced and link to their original site.

  • Nice folders with podcasts, videos and other multimedia.
  • “Attributions” tab seems to have carefully sourced/cited materials
  • “Student Projects” tab is empty, maybe because they are at the beginning of the semester.
  • “Contact and discuss” has nice profiles and a link to Blackboard discussion board.
  • Under “Topics and Readings” one of the links under “Units” link to Google Books (in Public Domain?). Another linked to firewalled Library portals where I’m prompted to enter CUNY password.

Where can I find…? Course readings? Homework assignments? Due dates? Class requirements?

I couldn’t find this stuff, and if it was my course I would have made it front and center. Especially a link to the syllabus with the above, as well as instructions on “How to use this site.” Perhaps there is also a Blackboard site with this information?

Using OER Evaluation Criteria

Content: Very rich content, especially the photos and multimedia
Comprehensiveness: Since I couldn’t find the syllabus it’s hard to do a cross-comparison
Attribution: Seems well sourced and cited, but I didn’t check each link
Organization: The navigation tabs are well done, but not knowing the structure of the class it’s hard to say how the content supports the assignments, etc.
Accessibility: Some links took me to firewalls (the College library)
Navigation: There was a dead link on one video, but all of the photos looked to be of high quality, good resolution, formatting, etc.
Modularity: Because the Topics and Readings were divided into “Units” it makes for easy compartmentalization and re-combination of the subtopics
Cultural Relevance: I like how the course wasn’t exclusively “classical” in the Greco-Roman sense, but acknowledge the rich traditions in Medicine from India, China, etc. Nice course!

OERs: How can they benefit faculty?

Open Educational Resources (OER) are a thriving resource that have many benefits for students.  OERs are a cost-effective solution for the increasing price of traditional textbooks. The content is mutable, as it can be updated and distributed in real-time. This can help avoid the problem of revised, multiple editions of print textbooks. OERs are also curated electronically. This migration from paper to digital content makes them more green and sustainable.

What are some benefits that faculty have in creating OERs? What are some other materials besides textbooks can be derived from OERs?

To answer these questions, you can use the resources found in the City Tech Library’s OER Libguide or the video for the first week of the syllabus.