Hello Everyone,
I am facilitating a workshop this week, as a part of the OE Global, in which my goal is to start building a community public outreach campaign around OERs. I’d love your insights for it.
Seeing as we’ve all been building OERs for ETEC 522 and other MET courses, I’d love your thoughts on what you see as the challenges to getting those OERs to your desired end user? What are your challenges beyond MET in building future OERs? Do your educator friends outside MET know about OERs? Do they use OERs – why or why not? Do they create OERs – why or why not? Where / how do you find OERs? Where / how do you share your OERs? Are there particular hashtags that you use when sharing your OERs on social media?
Thanks so much for your input!
Is anyone else attending OE Global this week? If so, let me know so I can search you out on the conference platform.
Lori Jones and I are also giving a Lightning Talk on Wednesday morning (8:20 am PST) on an Accessibility Project that we began to build with Eva Somogyi in the Ableism, Equity and Technology Course in the summer. Busy week, but should be full of some good conversations and idea sharing.
Hi Erica,
I’m going to pose an unhelpful question to you, which might prove to be helpful. I’ll be vulnerable and admit that I don’t understand most of your post. Actually, I still don’t really understand OERs beyond the context of this course. Are we talking Wikipedia? Have we stopped shaming Wikipedia? Are OERs just technical blogs? Are hipster travel couple blogger sites OERs? I didn’t actually realise OERs were a THING.
Those are my embarrassing questions. Why they may be helpful is this: my challenges are in understanding what they are, where to find them, what their purpose is and evaluating the validity of them. I don’t think my educator friends know about or use OERs, they either also don’t know about them or are concerned about the quality of information. I think they are all too busy marking and filing paperwork to create OERs. I don’t know how to use hashtags………… (bad millennial)
My guess would be that OERs need to be advertised better to educators (even sold by answering those questions I had, above). But, this looks very cool. Would you be able to give a brief pitch for OE Global?
Apologies for offering you more questions than answers.
Also… I’m assuming OE stands for Open Education? Might be helpful to clarify for those who are a bit behind on this topic. To me, OE is Outdoor Education.
That is actually really helpful, Jessica, as that right there spotlights so much of the issue, and I think you just gave me the introduction to my workshop.
Are you okay with me sharing that? Either anonymously or with your name attached – depending on your preference.
And yes, OER stands for Open Educational Resource – it’s only been the last couple of years that I myself learned that terminology.
Thanks Jessica.