Tech Thursday: Finding Open Educational Resources (OERs)
Put away your prior hesitations about OER materials, and do a little exploring...
This summer I worked with a team to develop Open Educational Resources (OER) for a new course we are piloting this fall. It was much more work than I think we anticipated, in large part because once you dive into the exciting world of being able to create an entire course from scratch, it’s hard not to keep adding more interesting readings and interactive activities. (If you’re interested, the grant that funded this work was a VIVA OER creation grant.) Doing this helped me explore the OER databases/search engines available, and if you haven’t recently tried to find texts for your subject area, I suggest you put away your prior hesitations about what in the past might have been incomplete or lower-quality materials, and do a little exploring. Your campus librarians can be an amazing resource here as well.
Video Guides to Using OER repositories
These are excellent video overviews for using four main OER repository sites. Click the image or here to view the videos (from Getting Started with OER by Jillian Maynard).
Links to OER repositories
These repositories are either curated databases or search engine-style sites. There are pros and cons to each - and of course, in your discipline, you may have other sites that are more helpful, particularly for finding specialized, upper-level texts.
Finding OER can be just as overwhelming as picking a traditional textbook. Again, your campus library staff are probably an excellent resource to help you find what you need.
Past Tech Thursdays
Student engagement: Climer cards / Digital exit tickets / Interactive quizzing / Online question management for classes & presentations / Wheel of Names (random name generator) / Providing audio feedback
Accessibility: Accessibility Infographics / Two programs to reduce eyestrain
Zoom: Name Breakout Rooms / Screen share in Zoom / How to Zoom in in Zoom
Research: Managing references / Find free versions of articles / Text Capture Apps
Using images: Extract text from images / Remove distracting backgrounds from photos / Using screenshots
Google: “Publish” from Google Drive / Google Classroom updates / “Make a copy” function in Google Drive / Working in shared Google docs / Collaborating in Google Slides / Turn Google Forms into a formatted document
Canvas: Custom Dashboard Labels / Canvas “What-if” grades / Deliver assignment instructions as a Quiz
Productivity: Study Skills Videos / Keeping Notes on Students / Keyboard shortcuts / Text Expanders / Mailbird email program / Voice-to-text options / Custom URLs & QR codes / DropBox Paper for collaboration