The interesting thing about this course is that it doesn’t really feel finished. My final project is a work in progress (more on that later), I don’t feel I’ve really had time for all of what we learned and accomplished together to sink in (it may not until I’m back at my school in September), and I’m enthusiastic about the potential for us all to continue some form of this journey together. Every day I was more and more impressed with how open, knowledgeable, understanding, and helpful each and every one of you is. Seems like teaching was a good choice!

Since today was the last day, and this post is my last official post, I should spend some time talking about my final project:

Open Educational Resources

Let me begin with the link: My final project!

It feels very “final” posting the link, but rest assured there is nothing final about what you will see there. I started out with a very grand idea, which I believe was rooted in a good intentions… or should I say two grand ideas:

1. There are a lot of amazing digital resources available online. I find out about them from a lot of different sources: our library website and teacher-librarian, random Google searches, colleagues, classes such as this one, blogs, luck. It would be amazing if there existed a database, searchable by subject and/or curriculum standard, with all of these amazing resources. Even more ideal would be if we could create and share resources to add to this database, and/or add comments and ratings.
2. Corporations seem very interested in getting their claws into education. There’s a lot of money to be made. Before school districts start spending a lot of cash on ready-made learning resources to standardize the system (“start” may not be the most appropriate choice of words….), it would be great if we could try out as many of these free options as possible, do amazing things with them, and then advocate their use because, let’s be honest, I bet the school boards would like the idea of “free”.

So, with those two thoughts in mind, my ideal goal was to create a site that is both a database of open education resources and a place to inform people about OER, how to find them, and how to contribute to them. Initially I was going to start with resources that support the British Columbia secondary science curriculum and I spent some time looking at PLO’s, then searching existing databases, identifying gaps, and thinking about what I could create to fill those gaps. I quickly realized that this idea for a project was much bigger than one person could do on their own – plus the whole purpose of the project was to get people collaborating on creating the database, not to do it myself. At this point I decided to make it more about providing teachers with information about OER, some background on the project, and a discussion forum in which to share stories and resources.

Challenges/Issues

I ran into a number of challenges with the project. The problem with developing a project of this type in a week is that by the time you identify what you want to do, do some research, and attempt to create a product, there isn’t much time for making changes when you realize there are issues. Many of these things will need to be addressed in the future – ideally when I get some additional collaborators on board:

• Is this site redundant? On the OER links page, I list several other amazing databases that are essentially doing what I want to do, but without the BC connection. One of my issues is that there already are so many different places to find resources – do we really need another one? When I recognized this issue, I chose to spend less time developing a database, and more time thinking about how to use and add to existing databases
• How can I get teachers and teacher-librarians interested in visiting and contributing to my site? This is clearly not a site that anyone is going to randomly stumble across. I tried to make my site as honest and useful as possible, keep it professional looking, and link to some high quality resources that may be unfamiliar to my colleagues. In the future, once I feel the site is where I want it, I will likely turn to my professional social network to recruit contributers
• Is there a better platform for what I want to do? I started out with Yola, tried Google sites, looked into the wiki option. I ended up on Blogger, but was disappointed with one or more aspects of each of these. Trying to figure out how to incorporate a discussion forum that was free, embeddable, and didn’t produce advertising led to a lot of dead ends. I also wanted to ability to blog so I could include updates as the site grows. This feels like the type of project that, if it is to be successful, may need someone who is a little better at website development to be a contributor. Even little things, like figuring out how to add static text to the blog page only on my site took a long time! I’m proud of how much I already tried out and what I learned to do, but I know, realistically, that once the school year begins I’ll have less time for the technical aspect. If there is a platform that has more of what I need, or comes with a more user-friendly interface, that would be useful!
• Do I even want to include a database of specific resources? Should my discussion forum topics be based more on identifying existing databases, advocacy for OER, getting BC curriculum tags on existing databases, and working on advice for creating and sharing resources? I’m still not sure! I left the discussion forum page in the “barely complete” stage because I can’t decide how to best use collaboration for the purpose of supporting the OER cause.

Final Thoughts

Before beginning my final project, I didn’t even know OER was a thing, or a movement. I knew that there were things available online, and that some of them were great. I’d heard of Khan academy, I knew there were some free textbooks and courses. I feel like I know so much more now, and I’m excited about the opportunity to contribute to what currently exists. If learning about Curriki is the only thing I take into my future practice, I’m already much better off than I was before. Realistically, I plan to do much more than that. I will have my classes this year create. We will share what we create. I will share what I know with my colleagues (as soon as I’m given to our department site on the district hub, I will post a link to my own new website!) and encourage them to create and share as well. I will also share what we’ve done in this course with my colleagues and administrators – hopefully we can all do the same to keep the ball rolling!