This post is my declaration that I have started OERu’s three week course entitled: Digital Skills for Open Educational Resources.
It has been a few years now that I have been thinking about, considering, moving toward ‘openness’ for content access; for a brief history of the journey see my Storify response to Sheila MacNeil’s call for feedback on How do you mainstream open education and OERs? Sheila is presenting at the OER15 Conference happening over the next couple of days.
There are a few reasons why I am thinking more about OER in my current workplace context and the resulting OER learning goals:
- Changes in the organizational funding environment have provided an opportunity to think differently about content and delivery mechanisms. It is an exciting time to start the conversation of alternate delivery to maximize return on contributions and educate stakeholders on the benefits of OER.
- My learning goal: 1. Be informed of the broader social benefits and policy implications of implementing OER in order to persuade stakeholders.
- ‘End of life’ for the proprietary Learning Management System (LMS) used for the past 6 years allowed us to transition materials to a new platform. This unexpected loss, has been one of the best things to happen for the opening up of content.
- My learning goal: 2. Make informed decisions on OER content design, and 3. Consider how to ‘track’ or evaluate OER impact on target learners in the absence of LMS reports.
- Colleagues have quickly moved materials from the LMS into a new website. There has been very little time to question or reflect on the strategy.
- My learning goal: 4. Discover how our organizational team can synchronously work through #ds4oer and apply learning to our teaching/learning context (will include interested colleagues in the #cdnELT community)!!
Coincidently, I will also be attending the Open Educational Global Conference in Banff next week (April 21-24). In this intense immersion in #ds4oer and #oeglobal I hope to fulfill some of my learning goals 🙂
A great foundational document on OER on WikiEducator, is the Open Educational Content – Introduction and Tutorials a project of OLCOS.
Looking forward to learning with fellow #ds4oer participants.
Briar
Hi Briar, Great reflection and appropriate goals. Have you registered your blog url? If you do this plus add use the WP tag feature to add the DS4OER code as a tag, we can harvest your posts in the aggregated feed. I’ll be in Bannff attending a UNESCO OER Chair meeting (and conference 😉 – so will be an opportunity to meet f-t-f.
Hi Briar! FOOLS RUSH IN….took me forever to set up miserable little WordPress blog! I have other blogs (somewhat neglected – eslclaudie’s e-learning blog – remember) but I was interested in looking at WordPress. I’m diving and bobbing into the course material as fast as I can to play catch up…and I’m coming into it with a sceptical and jaundiced approach about OER…and repositories (graveyards) as i tweeted to you…But – I keep an open mind and my heart’s in the right place. 🙂
Awesome Briar, great initiative, openness is all about sharing, ‘we can only keep what we have by giving it away’