Wednesday 16 April 2014

How useful were the OER repositories?

[Activity 8]

In common with many of my classmates, I found this an extremely frustrating exercise - probably made subjectively worse because I could write/produce many of these materials quite quickly myself (I teach TU100 - My Digital Life, and messaging/security companies have been previous employers/are current clients).

I probably didn't spend as long as I should have done in each repository - I daresay once I'd got used to the best way to search one of them, I'd find better quality materials more quickly. I did find a US government website through Merlot - and I could have done the whole course using materials from there without bothering to look elsewhere.

Some of the issues were simply those of presentation or a level of inconsistency in terminology. The bigger problems were when the resources had been written for a specific purpose and it didn't meet the needs of my audience. I had in mind an introductory course for those who would be studying online courses to make sure their technical skills were up to the task, and although I hadn't included such things as word processing or the use of imaging software, I did think the topics I'd picked would be easy to work with.

I found, though, that it was quite difficult to pick out the relevant bits and discard some of the specific. For example, I found some materials on the use of Skype in education - but they were written for teachers, not learners... and assumed you already knew how to use Skype and just wanted to find out how it could help teaching and learning.

I did find I was very tempted to modify the contents of my course to fit the resources I could find - although the topics would still need to be relevant and useful. I would be less likely to do that if I was creating them myself.

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