Week 5: Selecting and using OER

Introduction

Last week you started to use OER as a potentially valuable source of ideas and support in meeting professional needs. In this week’s assignment you will be extending your work to select OER in order to address local issues and circumstances. In addition, there are four other activities in which you will explore different OER repositories and judge the usefulness of the OER for your context.

1 Adapting OER to meet learner needs

There are various models found in the literature that describe the process of producing and adapting OER. The model below has been developed by the course team to describe the process of selection, adaptation and use of OER for a learning episode.

This week you will work through some of these steps with an OER that you choose. 

Maximise

Figure 1

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The image shows the OER adaptation process as a flow diagram with a series of boxes with arrows leading from one box to the next. On the left side of the image is a box with the words ‘Identify learning need’. An arrow points from it to the next box: ‘Search for OER’. This leads to ‘Select OER’. There is now a choice: one arrow leads to ‘Use in practice’; another arrows leads to ‘Adapt/refine’ and then on to ‘Use in practice’. After ‘Use in practice’ comes ‘Evaluate after use’. Then there is a choice to either ‘Share’ the OER or return to ‘Adapt/refine’ and back again to ‘Use in practice’.

Figure 1

1. Identify learning need: This is the motivation for searching, linked to goals and development needs. The starting point is always a defined learning need. In your work, this is a teacher’s learning need – that is, what they need to be able to do and know after the learning episode. (If you are working in a school, this learning need should relate to the school development plan that has been developed with the school management committee.)
2. Search for OER: Finding suitable OER to support development needs.
3. Select OER: Judging whether the OER are suitable for use and whether they can be adapted for the intended teaching and learning context.
4. Adapt/refine: Modifying the OER to use in context; refining it after evaluating its use to support learning.
5. Use in practice: Using the adapted resource in a teaching context.
6. Evaluate after use: Judging how well the OER has met the learning needs.
7. Share: Sharing the OER with your local community and wider. The local community might be teacher educators you work with, headteachers in your district, colleagues in another DIET or colleagues in your university. When you share the adapted OER, include notes on how the OER was used and its successes or otherwise in meeting the learning needs of the teachers. 

2 Finding suitable OER

Earlier in this MOOC you examined the TESS-India OER. There are now a very large number of OER repositories from institutions and organisations around the world, all in different languages and covering a vast number of subjects. The materials in these repositories reflect the views of learning and learners held by those developing and sharing the OER. By looking at OER in different repositories you will gain a sense of where you can find materials that you feel comfortable with and can use.

Activity 5.2 will help you explore some OER repositories and consider the type of materials that they contain.

3 Selecting OER 

With such a large number of OER available, it can be difficult to find OER that are useful to you. As a first step, it’s important to think about the criteria that you will use in selecting useful OER, including its appropriateness, adaptability and quality. The TESS-India OER have undergone a process of critical review and quality assurance, but not all OER have undergone a quality assurance process. Therefore, it is important to judge the quality of the OER.

In the Open University course Creating open educational resources, a useful OER, is described as being:

• findable, it can be in multiple locations, making it easy to locate 
• clearly described, so that you can quickly assess whether it will be useful for you and/or your teacher learners
• clearly licensed (usually through Creative Commons), which tells you if you can adapt the OER and other conditions of use
• from a source you trust
• being used/recommended by people like you
• easy to modify for your students
• free-standing, so it does not assume knowledge of other resources and is easier to integrate into a course or learning episode
• imperfect – it just needs to work for you and/or your teacher learners.

You can also find this list in the document ‘Criteria for Evaluating OER’.

You should also consider the view of learning that informs the OER and whether this is in line with the shifts in teaching and learning processes that you want to support.

4 Using OER for your own purposes

You found other OER as part of Activity 5.2; and in Week 4 (Activity 4.2) you considered how you might use a TESS-India teacher development OER in your own teaching.

Remember that if an OER does not meet your needs exactly you can adapt it to suit your needs. However, if you decide to share an adapted OER, you must ensure that its licence permits you to do so. There are different sorts of licence and different conditions that you need to meet. For example, you may be required to submit revised versions of the OER to the original repository, or acknowledge the original source.

You can find out more about the different licences from the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education website.

In Activity 5.4 you will select an OER and consider how you will use it.

Activity 5.4 is Assignment 5 of the portfolio of participation. In order to complete this assignment effectively you will need to identify a peer or colleague who is willing to work with you on the task. As with Activity 3.3, you may need to provide them with some key background information about the TESS-India OER prior to working with you on your assignment. For example, that the TESS-India OER:

• position teachers and teacher educators as active learners
• bring together theory and practice to support educators in implementing active participatory approaches to learning.

5 Sharing OER

Sharing involves making the OER available for the education community to use. How can you achieve this?

A starting point is to make it available on your local SCERT website or give it to colleagues for their use. This will allow you to review the OER by gathering feedback so that you can improve it for future use. 

6 Reviewing your learning

7 Moving forward

At the end of this week we hope you are now familiar with the concept of OER and how these might be used to meet the professional learning needs of the teachers that you work with. You have looked in detail at the TESS-India OER and considered how you can incorporate them into your own work, and also started to explore other OER repositories.

We hope that in the future you will continue to explore different OER, and adapt them and share them for others to use and further adapt. OER allow all of us to be content creators and benefit from the knowledge, imagination and skills of our teacher education colleagues.

Now go to Week 6: Integrating OER into teacher education.

References

Acknowledgements

Except for third party materials and otherwise stated, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence.

Specific content from the TESS-India OER, including images from the TESS-India video resources, are made available under this licence unless otherwise stated.

The TESS-India project is led by The Open University, UK and is funded by UK AID from the UK government.