3.6 If you want to know more ...

Understanding open practices and open educational resources

The DigiLit project at Leicester City Council in the UK [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] has produced a series of guides to help educators, particularly those teaching in the compulsory education sector, to understand and use OER. These include G1 Open Education and the Schools Sector and G2 Understanding Open Licensing for more information on open licensing and what OER is.  

If you’d like to spend a bit more time looking at Creative Commons licensing and how to use them, you can participate in a free open online course at Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) called Get CC Savvy. P2PU also run courses called Open Detective and Intro to Openness in Education that will help you understand different types of openly licensed material.

If you’re interested in looking in more detail at different licence types (including those for open source software), it’s worth looking at this comparison of free and open-source software licences or reading more about open source licensing.

To find out more about connectivism, read George Siemen’s ‘Connectivism – a learning theory for the digital age’ (2005) or watch ‘10 minute lecture – George Siemens – curational teaching’.

Using open educational resources

Here are some more ideas for where to look for openly licensed resources:

• JiSC’s Digital Media Guide, ‘Finding video, audio and images online’.
• An Open Education Working Group blog post ‘Illustrating open education’ (by Marieke Guy) has a useful list of places to look for openly licensed content. 
• You can search for OER by subject or look at specific subject repositories. The Royal Geographical Society highlights a number of sources for OER in geography, for example. 
• Read more about how the OER Assistant is helping educators find OER according to learning objectives. 

There are some useful guides to developing online teaching and learning available, including:

• ORBIT: The Open Resource Bank for Interactive Teaching.
• University of Leicester’s ‘Writing and structuring online learning materials’.

Now go to Section 4 of the course.