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Tuesday, 24 Mar 2020, 15:04

Visible to anyone in the world

Edited by Henry James Robinson, Wednesday, 25 Mar 2020, 12:26

HI!

Happy Nauryz everyone. I hope you all found time to spend time with your mothers on Mother's Day!

This week, we were asked to imagine we were constructing a five-week, online course aimed at providing a set of learners with resources for developing their ‘digital skills’, with a different subject each week. For me, it would be for young learners - pre-undergraduates. We were asked to visit a set of Open Educational Resource (OER) Websites (sources of materials that can be reused, repurposed, redesigned freely) and evaluate them in terms of how they were able to cater to each of the topics of our imaginary courses.

I devise a broad outline of the topics to be covered every week (see the grid below). The OER repositories we were given are the following:

I used the topics listed below and added the word 'training' or 'skills' for my searches and looked for teaching or readily adaptable for teaching materials in my results. Overall, I did find a few of them useful and some of them not very useful at all. I am happy they are there and the ones I liked I will probably use again.

Have a look at how each of the sites did:

Week	Topic	Resources	Suitability (G/M/B)
1	Social Media	Solvonauts: The search engine is clunky to use. I needed to enter the search several times. Resources limited to picture, Video and Audio search	I couldn’t find a range of video or audio, so I tried for images. Materials there were fine, as it says, not its own repositories, so suitability criteria of little relevance except that it brought me to an irrelevant page of Flikr. It can all be repurposed (CC) but audio I found was a bit out of date.
2	Search Engine Marketing	Merlot: The website easy to use, except the type of material not always clear until you click. Some interesting features like ’create a learning material’ and volunteer to be a reviewer.	A lot of UpToDate materials including eBooks and articles that could be repurposed. What I wanted could not be repurposed (CC) coz Prezi is online and it was a bit out of date and was focussed on the US.
3	Analytics	MIT: State of art; subscription options, links to twitter, FB, WP, and Instagram.	Found two full beginners’ courses on inc this: analytics. The clear spoken audio also great sound quality and available on YouTube made it readily adaptable. Up to date and highly suitable with loads of additional materials of different kinds.
4	Mobile	Open Learning: Very attractive design and user friendly.	The searches were aided by a warning for materials over 5 years old and I like the pdf, Word format choices. I found materials at advanced called: Accessibility of eLearning and low level called 'Digital literacy succeeding in a digital world' and a podcast a variety of other materials from video to audio to a podcast called University of the Future - very good.
5	Video	Stax and Saylor: Clunky, slow and a bit bewildering to use. E.g click on courses – there’s a limited choice; click on programs and I get a mockup of a Saylor course certificate. I wanted something on books so Stax is maybe not the sources, coz It apparently only has books.	I found zilch that was useful on either site - maybe it was me but also maybe it’s good that Stax is retiring, to be moved to an archive. However, when I tried the Open University Open Learning site, I found a course on creating open materials including a section on video – great. A start anyway.

As you can see, generally I was quite satisfied, but one or two of the sites fell below my expectations. There is a possibility that is because the sites just were not suitable for my course and/or my lack of knowledge of them meant I was unable to use them properly in the limited time I had to search. As our course tutor points out: Different sites have different requirements, follow different 'regulations', and restrictions. 'Some make accessibility a requirement, while others offer guidelines' (Open University, 2020).