Finding OERs
Exercise 3.8 of #FLble1 asked us to use the list of curated lists of Open Educational Resources (OERs reproduced below) to look for and post an OER for discussion.
- Jorum – free learning and teaching resources, created and contributed by teaching staff from UK FE and HE institutions
- Merlot – MERLOT is a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community.
- Open University’s OpenLearn – The Open University’s range of free educational courses and resources.
- MIT’s Open Courseware – Free online educational resources from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- XPERT – repository of e-learning resources created through the open source e-learning development tool called Xerte Online Toolkits
- Khan academy – 3600 videos from across many disciplines
- TES – shared teaching resources of all kinds, mainly for schools, but also for the VET sector.
- OER COMMONS – open educational resources for all sectors.
I posted my response in the comments but reproduce it here.
“I tried all the links looking for “control engineering” and found some materials from Sheffield (via Jorum) and the US (via MIT’s OCW) which looked like whole courses and a few textbooks via MERLOT. I’ll post the links here if there’s interest.
“Other observations: the [results of using the] XPERT search engine leaves a lot to be desired and I couldn’t find anything useful in the search results. Khan academy has no suitable materials because it seems to be aiming to cover the basics of maths, and computing. The OU has very good resources but you have to be lucky to find something specific (and they seem keen to highlight their television tie-ins). OER commons returned very little that was useful.
“In my personal use of OERs I’ve found YouTube to be the most useful source! So here’s a playlist by Brian Dougls that I have used: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUMWjy5jgHK3j74Z5Tq6Tso1fSfVWZC8L in my module EGLM03 Modern Control Systems. [I do this] by embedding a video into my VLE to provide another point of view [on a topic that is covered in an activity].
“To summarise, there is a problem of discovery for OERs. Reminds me a bit of the old days of the web where there were lots of curated sites and directories but no “Google” to search everywhere.”
Chris Jobling November 18th, 2015
