0.8 Oer delivery, storage, and organization

OER Delivery, Storage and Organization

Lesson components

• Fast Fact
• Skill/Objective
• Success Indicators
• Introduction
• Activity
• Review questions
• Resources

Fast fact

"As of January 2006, there were over 3,200 modules and over 150 courses in Connexions. Volunteers are translating modules and courses into a wide variety of different languages, including Spanish, Japanese,Italian, Chinese, Portuguese, and Thai." - OECD

Skills/objectives

Learners will be able to:

• Course participants will use various tools as well as peer collaboration to build a Public Domain Materials Portfolio of discipline-specific public domain materials suitable for use in their own teaching.
• Determine cost-effective printing options for students.

Success indicators

• OER added to learner's own online collection or portfolio.
• OER review posted by the learner.  

Introduction

Several resources are available on the Internet that provide teachers with tools to organize, deliver, and share OER for use in instruction. Some of these are: MERLOT, Connexions, and WikiEducator. Instructors can deliver deliver OER to students in either digital or print formats. OLCOS, the UK's Open Learning Content Observatory Services project contains a 30 minute tutorial about how to  publish and share OER .

Oer commons

OER Commons allows members to share portfolios. Your personalized portfolio allows you quick access to your previous use of the OER Commons. As you engage with OER content by submitting ratings and reviews, your portfolio is created automatically. If desired, you can share your portfolio with others and allow others to build on what you know. Also, you can view others’ portfolios to see how people are finding, using, and interacting with OER.

Merlot

Read about MERLOT's Personal Collections . Build and display your portfolio, as it evolves for the duration of your students' course participation, using the From the Author Snapshots.

Wikieducator

WikiEducator provides an Content Development Project as an opportunity for insturctors to contribute and share their OER.

Connexions

Funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Connexions is part of a broader effort to use the internet for innovative delivery of educational materials. At Connexions, instructors can set up a collection of learning materials.  A course/collection contains several Connexions modules that you group together in a specific order. These modules will appear as chapters in a single document to Connexions visitors who view your course/collection. 

Rice University's Connexions provides on-demand printing with QOOP Inc. that will allow students and instructors to order high-quality, hardbound textbooks from Connexions via the internet for affordable prices. 

In the Connexions Community College Initiative, the top 10 community college courses, including English composition, college algebra, introduction to psychology, general chemistry, are being developed. These courses will be available for free in Connexions and in a low-cost printed form.  Under this model, readers can access all books online for free, and they will pay only if they want a printed book, which they'll order online and for home delivery. Connexions also plans to develop a catalog of the 10 most-popular community college textbooks, which also will be free for online viewing and cost less than $30 when purchased as hardbound books. Connexions plans to offer more than 100 titles for online purchase by year's end.

Delivery of course materials

OER developers can distribute their learning materials via the internet using the tools and resources provided for free to educators at WordCircle , NiceNet , Digication , or Epsilen .

Publishing learning materials

Lulu lets you publish and sell and print on demand books, e-books, online music, images, custom calendars safari  Take a tour of Lulu to find out how to publish using their services. Lulu makes 20% of total cost of the textbook you publish using their services. SafariU allows faculty to create, publish and share customized comuter science and information technology course materials. SafariU was developed by O'Reilly Media in conjunction with substantial feedback from educators and trainers. SafariU allows members to select chapters or sections from O'Reilly books and articles to include in custom print books and online learning resources that students can access directly. Other print-on-demand services include Illumina and  exlibris

Activity

Experience

OER Commons

• If you haven't already done so, join OER Commons. Go to the OER Commons website, then click on Join Now.
• Click on Start My OER Portfolio.
• Visit Shared Portfolios posted to the OER Commons website to see to see how others search, use, and interact with OER.

MERLOT

• View the Gallery of Sample MERLOT From the Author Snapshots  then find out how to create your own Author Snapshot  using the KEEP Toolkit .
• Go to the MERLOT website.
  • View a few Personal Collections posted by others.
  • Create your own MERLOT Personal Collection

Connexions

• Create a Course/Collection at the Connexions website.

Reflect

Post your response to the following to your course Discussion area:

• What is the best way for you to disseminate OER to your students?
• Do you want to share your OER for public use and repurposing? Why or why not?

Apply

• Create a module to share at Connexions.
• Determine the cost to your students to purchase OER for your course using Lulu .

Review questions

• What are some of the print-on-demand services for disseminating OER?
• What tools and features are available to deliver OER?

Resources

• Case Study: Promoting Use of MERLOT Learning Objects by Sharing Authors' and Users' Pedagogical Knowledge
• Open Educational Practices and Resources. OLCOS Roadmap 2012
• What Makes an Open Education Program Sustainable: The Case of Connexions