This week we will focus on how educators source and develop digital resources for use in teaching and learning with a special focus on open education. There are two papers to review, one from the Bates text and one that I wrote. My paper explores the idea of teachers as content creators as they curate and develop materials to support teaching and learning. Much of my research has explored how educators use the web to find inspiration, source, combine, develop, remix, and share educational material and how that opens up new pedagogical approaches. This article attempts to bring together many of those threads and documents some of the opportunities that educators can take advantage of. Read critically (I will not take critique personally) and I appreciate your comments on this work. Next week we will talk more about open educational resources, and how to find, use, remix, and share them to support your teaching.

Readings for this week

Bates, T. (2019). Open educational resources (OER) in Chapter 11: Trends in open education. https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/teachinginadigitalagev2/chapter/oer/

Paskevicius, M. (2021). Educators as Content Creators in a Diverse Digital Media Landscape. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2021(1), 18.

Please add at least one annotation to the text, but don’t hold back if you want to add more!

The following videos will also help introduce you to the idea of open education.

 

To do

I would like you to take a quick peek into the world of open educational resources. You can search for resources related to the teaching you do or that might be useful to provide ideas and inspiration for your course project. You can find teaching and learning resources using one or more of the following repositories:

    • Most Recommended if you can only review only one: OER Commons offers a comprehensive infrastructure for curriculum experts and instructors at all levels to identify high-quality OER and collaborate around their adaptation, evaluation, and use to address the needs of teachers and learners. (Most suitable for K-12) – https://oercommons.org/
    • CK-12 Foundation is a California-based non-profit organization which aims to increase access to low-cost K-12 education in the United States and abroad. https://www.ck12.org/teacher/
    • BC Open Education Collection by BCcampus, find free, open, and customizable materials by course or subject. (Mostly higher education) – https://collection.bccampus.ca/
    • MIT Open Courseware Collection – the first university to start sharing teaching materials openly back in the early 2000’s. (higher education) – https://ocw.mit.edu/
    • The PhET Interactive Simulations collection was founded in 2002 by Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman, the project at the University of Colorado Boulder creates free interactive math and science simulations. (all levels) https://phet.colorado.edu/

Optional

An additional optional reading is available. I have heard a few people mention the concept ‘learning styles’ in relation to learning design. This reading builds a case from a neurological perspective about some of the most common misconceptions in learning, leaning styles being one of the most contentious. We can discuss this next week if there is interest.

Howard-Jones, P. A. (2014). Neuroscience and education: Myths and messages. Nature Reviews. Neuroscience, 15(12), 817–824. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3817

Slides from Week Four

Plus our beautiful mosaic of learning activity visualizations