TI-MOOC Enhancing teacher education through OER: TESS-India

Week 5: Selecting and using OER

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Contents

- Introduction

- 1 Adapting OER to meet learner needs

- 2 Finding suitable OER

- 3 Selecting OER

- 4 Using OER for your own purposes

- 5 Sharing OER

- 6 Reviewing your learning

- 7 Moving forward

- References

- Acknowledgements

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.

Activity 5.1: Reviewing OER

Allow approximately 15 minutes

Complete the short review quiz about OER (5 questions), choosing the correct answer in each case.

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.

Figure 1

View description - 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.

Activity 5.2: Exploring other OER sites

Allow approximately 40 minutes

1. Look at the short PowerPoint presentation ‘Open Educational Resources (OER)’, which gives you an overview of OER across the world.

2. List the topics that you will be teaching to teachers or pre-service teachers in the next few weeks and think about their professional development needs. This might be specific classroom methodologies, an issue such as assessment or subject knowledge.

3. With this list in mind, look at the materials on at least three of the repositories listed below. All of the repositories have materials relevant to teacher education. You may need to register to access the materials, but no cost is involved.

- National Repository of Open Educational Resources (NROER) (MHRD/NCERT)

- Karnataka Open Educational Resources

- Pratham Books has been releasing its books under Creative Commons licences

- Khan Academy

- OER Commons

- OpenStax CNX

- Commonwealth of Learning

- OER Africa

- OpenLearn Works

- Ciênsação

4. Note your thoughts in response to these questions:

- What features of each of the sites do you like?

- What view of learning do you think informs the OER on different sites? Is it aligned with a participatory, active approach?

5. Download an OER that you could use in the next few weeks. Why did you choose this OER?

6. Share with a peer or colleague your thoughts about the OER sites you examined. Are they familiar with any of the sites you looked at? Can they suggest any other useful OER sites? Note down any suggestions they may have.

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.

Activity 5.3: Evaluating OER

Allow approximately 40 minutes

1. Using the OER you downloaded from one of the websites you visited in Activity 5.2, consider the following questions:

- Who is your target audience for the OER and what do you want them to learn?

- What is the context? Is this a course or a free-standing resource?

- What are the learning outcomes? Are they relevant to your learners?

- What does it suggest about the underlying view about learning and learners?

- Is the language appropriate for your learners?

- Is it suitably demanding?

- Will the activities enable the learning outcomes to be met?

- What changes might you need to make?

2. Using your notes from above, write a few bullet points (in no more than 100 words) setting out what attracted you to the OER, the aspects you like and don’t like, and how well it would suit your situation. What would you want to change?

3. Share the OER and your thoughts about it with a peer or colleague.

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.

Reflection point

To what extent was the TESS-India OER you chose suited to what you wanted to do and to your context? Did you find that any parts of it were not suitable? Were there parts of the OER that were particularly useful? What were the challenges you faced?

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.

Activity 5.4: Assignment 5 – Select OER and plan for use

Allow approximately 1 hour

1. Find an OER (either from TESS-India or somewhere else) that would be useful in your own work with teachers.

2. Write a paragraph or two (no more than 200 words) that:

- gives the title and pedagogical focus of the OER

- explains why you selected this OER and what you want your teachers or student teachers to learn from it

- describes how you would organise your teachers or student teachers in order to do the activities in the OER so they are actively engaged with the ideas

- explains any small amendments you would want to make to the OER.

3. Share the OER you selected and your response to it with a peer or colleague.

4. Ask your colleague to provide you with some feedback (50–100 words) using the following questions to guide their response:

- Are the suggestions for using the OER engaging, motivating and helpful for teachers or student teachers?

- Does the OER have the potential to be useful to other teacher educators in a similar context?

5. Record the feedback you received in your notebook.

Optional activity

If your colleague is willing, repeat the activity with the roles reversed – ask them to select an OER and write a paragraph or two on how they would use it. Provide them with feedback using the questions above to guide your response.

- In your notebook, record their response and the feedback you provided.

Reflection point

What challenges did you encounter in selecting and evaluating OER? How could you encourage colleagues to find OER and use them? What support do you think might be helpful?

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

Activity 5.5: Reviewing your learning

Allow approximately 20 minutes

This week you have focused on the process of finding, using and evaluating OER. In Activity 5.4 you selected an OER for use in your context. What did you learn from the feedback you received?

Note what have you learned about using OER and sharing them with others.

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

Commonwealth of Learning, http://www.col.org/ (accessed 22 October 2015).

Creating open educational resources (OpenLearn course), http://www.open.edu/openlearn/education/creating-open-educational-resources/content-section-0 (accessed 10 April 2015).

Karnataka Open Educational Resources, http://karnatakaeducation.org.in/KOER/en/index.php/Main_Page (accessed 10 April 2015).

Khan Academy, https://www.khanacademy.org/ (accessed 10 April 2015).

National Repository of Open Educational Resources, http://nroer.in/home/ (accessed 10 April 2015).

OER Africa, http://www.oerafrica.org/ (accessed 10 April 2015).

OER Commons, https://www.oercommons.org/ (accessed 10 April 2015).

OpenLearn Works, http://www.open.edu/openlearnworks/ (accessed 10 April 2015).

OpenStax CNX, http://cnx.org/ (accessed 10 April 2015).

Pratham Books (undated) ‘CC tracker’ (online). Available from: http://blog.prathambooks.org/p/cc-tracker.html (accessed 10 April 2015).

University of Cambridge Faculty of Education (2012) ‘Teaching approaches/Adapting and sharing resources’ (online), 13 October. Available from: http://oer.educ.cam.ac.uk/wiki/Teaching_Approaches/Adapting_and_sharing_resources (accessed 10 April 2015).

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.

Figure 1

Description

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’.

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