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Anna C Page

H817 Week 8 Activity 8 An OER course

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Edited by Anna Carolyn Page, Saturday, 27 Mar 2021, 08:51

Imagine you are constructing a course in digital skills for an identified group of learners (e.g. undergraduates, new employees, teachers, mature learners, military personnel, etc.). It is a short, online course aimed at providing these learners with a set of resources for developing ‘digital skills’. It runs for five weeks, with a different subject each week, accounting for about six hours study per week.

  • Devise a broad outline of the topics to be covered every week. Don’t deliberate too much on this; it should be a coherent set of topics but you don’t actually have to deliver it.
  • Now see how much of your desired content could be accommodated by using OER repositories. Search the following repositories and make a quick evaluation for each week of your course of the type of content that is available. 
  • Judge whether the resources are good, medium or bad in terms of suiting your needs.


Course topics for a basic digital skills course for learners unfamiliar with using online technologies might include the following topics:

  • Week 1 Your digital hardware
  • Week 2 Navigating the internet
  • Week 3 Online communication skills
  • Week 4 Safety and privacy online
  • Week 5 Digital transactions

The interface of Solvonauts is very simple but the results display is not user friendly as it doesn’t help the user quickly identify potential resources – everything is all one colour and one size, it is hard to distinguish one result from another!

The Merlot interface for results is reasonably good, with a comprehensive filter system (discipline, material type, audience, mobile platform, other filters which even included reviews, ratings, licence, cost). But I didn’t find anything obviously useful in an initial search.

The MIT interface was reasonably clear, though there were no helpful filters and my search for ‘online communication skills’ produced a course which might yield some suitable material (Communicating with mobile technology). Once investigating further, MIT provide the following information about a course: course home, syllabus, readings, lecture notes, assignments and a ‘download course materials’ section. So it was possible to get a sense of what topics might be covered in the course before attempting to download the package. There is a helpful FAQ screen about how to use the download https://ocw.mit.edu/help/faq-technology/.

The OpenSTAX interface includes some filters (publication date, author, type, keyword, subject) but my search for “online communication skills” (it had to be in double quotes to search the phrase rather than the search engine treat it as 3 separate words) didn’t reveal any quickly identifiable potentially useful results.

The Saylor interface didn’t have the search function easily visible on the home page; I had to click through to courses before a search function appeared. I got no results for “online communication skills” and one result for “online communication” (preparing and delivering presentations) which wasn’t close enough to what I was seeking. On the courses page below the search bar, the courses are categorised by subject area, I scrolled down and spotted Learning in a digital age under the “Learning skills” category. The course covers “digital literacies for online learning”, “digital citizenship”, “open education, copyright and open licensing” and “critical media literacies and associated digital skills”. However I could not find a ‘download this course’ function, it would be necessary to view and download individual elements of the course for remixing into a new OER. Interestingly, review comments revealed one user pointing out that the course was too advanced for beginners.

OpenLearn is very familiar(!) to me. It uses a Google custom search and has a filters system within each subject area page (select a topic, types of course, levels, resource length). It has dedicated sections for Skills (at work, for life). I found the following potential OER via the Education subject area:

Via the Skills page I also found Preparing for your digital life in the 21st century plus several other possibilities.

Although OpenLearn offers a variety of downloadable formats of its courses for studying offline, it is not necessarily easy to edit the downloaded versions, with some formats requiring knowledge of digital editing software to extract the elements desired for a remix. The Word and PDF versions obviously cannot include the video and audio elements of a course, which would have to be downloaded separately and the Moodle quizzes are never included in the downloadable versions. The SCORM downloads are SCORM 1.2 though sometimes don’t work when loaded up to another virtual learning environment depending upon how long ago the SCORM file was generated from the OU structured content (XML) rendering process. The system has been fixed in the past year so the more recently rendered SCORM files have a working manifest telling the VLE how to load and run the SCORM package. OpenLearn’s sister platform OpenLearn Create has the same issue with the download versions.

However, there is a course on OpenLearn Create on the topic of basic digital literacy skills called Everyday computer skills: a beginner’s guide to computers, tablets, mobile phones and accessibility. It was written by the OU in Scotland, partly based on some OpenLearn OER, because they could not find a suitable course in the various OER repositories, which often seem to include much more advanced information for students already familiar with using digital technologies to support their learning (my searches for ‘online communication skills’ mostly revealed courses about computer network technologies).

Although OER is available openly online and is often downloadable, the variety of formats of OER materials and how they were created can make it hard to edit downloaded OER. This is because different systems may not be interoperable, which often means resorting to copy and paste to rebuild an OER rather than having the ability to edit an entire OER easily in your chosen software. This is an ongoing challenge for the OER movement.


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