#COER13 – How to create OER

The third #COER week is about creating own Open Educational Resources.

I am lagging somehow behind, but this is a familiar condition for me, reminding me on my MAODE study, where I always had the feeling running behind. 😉

I just examine the reading material and it is an interesting collection. Open eLearning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS) offers on WikiEducator a resource about Open Educational Content. The wiki is a collaborative work to create an online-book which objective according to OLCOS is to  support students and teachers in the creation, re-use and sharing of e-learning material. The page is available in several language including English, German, Spanish but also Swedish and Finnish. It’s just to sad that the source is from 2007, latest updated 2008. I am sure a lot of information still applies, but e.g. the tutorial: Use open source tool, –  this weeks topic – is pretty outdated.

The OLCOS structure strongly reminds me on the #COER structure. But there is no need to reinvent the wheel, as the structure is good. I think that is the often the problem from teachers, that a lot of teachers still think they have to create their own educational resources, instead of combining their effort. This is what I most appreciate about this MOOC, raising the awareness about OER and bringing people together to combine their effort to create OER and offer it for free to everyone. Educational publisher might not like that, but considering the rise of MOOCs that has a similar goal – free education for everyone, it seems that the philosophy of openness spreads rapidly.

However, there is also newer material available, e.g. the OER Handbook for Educators 1.0 from 2010.

Brand-new is the ‘General Guide for Creating Open Content‘ from Funny Monkey. I briefly scanned through the article and I loved especially this extract.

“Content that is encumbered under a restrictive license is essentially fixed in time, where openly licensed content can evolve over time through use and reuse.”

Those interested on a comprehensive, up-to-date resource about available technologies and there use to create OER I recommend the suggested article from Abeywardena, Ishan Sudeera (2012). The Re-use and Adaptation of Open Educational Resources (OER). An Exploration of Technologies Available.

COER13 also provided a list of permanent courses.

• OER Workshop and the Asia OER Workshop
• Creating Open Educational Resources from the Open University OpenLearn

I also watched the recorded online-event, thanks to the #COER13 team for providing it 🙂 André Spang presented several tools to create and publish OER. The tools ranged from wikis, blogs, YouTube, Soundcloud, Prezi, Flickr, etc. For closer information please visit André’s website (German). The introduced tools where all Open-Source software or free-of-charge available. Anyways, I am still uncertain whether an OER needs to be created and published with a (free) Open-Source tool or if I can use a commercial tool as well. I never considered the choice of tools important in the development of an OER. Can anybody please enlighten me.