1 Open Educational Resources (OER)
The internet provides vast amounts of OER for use and reuse. This may be text, video, graphics or audio and is free of charge. It’s usually produced by educational institutions and published online to the general public for their immediate use or for repurposing according to the users’ needs. This fast-paced Short History of English , for example, was loaded onto YouTube by The Open University in 2011.
Transcript: Short History of English
The History of English in 10 Minutes
Chapter Two, the Norman Conquest, or Excuse My English. 1066. True to his name, William the Conqueror invades England, bringing new concepts from across the Channel, like the French language, the Doomsday Book, and the duty-free Gauloises multipack.
French was de rigueur for all official business, with words like judge, jury, evidence, and justice coming in and giving John Grisham’s career a kick start. Latin was still used ad nauseum in church, but the common man spoke English, able to communicate only by speaking more slowly and loudly until the others understood him.
Words like ‘cow’, ‘sheep’ and ‘swine’ come from the English-speaking farmers, while the a la carte versions – ‘beef’, ‘mutton’ and ‘pork’ – come from the French-speaking toffs, beginning a long running trend for restaurants having completely indecipherable menus. All in all, the English absorbed about 10,000 new words from the Normans, though they still couldn’t grasp the rules of cheek kissing.
The bonhomie all ended when the English nation took their new war-like lingo of armies, navies and soldiers and began the 100 Years’ War against France. It actually lasted 116 years, but by that point, no one could count any higher in French, and English took over as the language of power.
OER can also be created by individuals, so the production of OER is not exclusive to educational institutions although largely dominated by them.
In this course you will look at three institutional OER initiatives – MIT’s open courseware, Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative and The Open University’s OpenLearn. You will get a flavour of how different OER initiatives design and present the content for their audiences.
You will also have the option to find, discuss and redesign some OER material. You can choose your audience for the material and redesign it to fit their needs.