OER Commons

OER Commons is a site which points to open educational material (ie which fits in the broad spectrum of Open Education Resources). This page is to explore how OER Commons can point to Wikiversity material - what material it could focus on, how it would be listed and tagged, what metadata it could use, etc. This page is part of Wikiversity's outreach program.

Vision behind the project:

OER Commons, which was developed in order to stimulate the development of a teaching and learning ecosystem that thrives on interaction, participation and knowledge sharing, aggregates OER within a social networking environment.

OER Commons aggregates existing OER and helps to open new resources within a network that allows teachers, students and self-learners to find materials more easily, but more importantly, to engage users around their development and improvement. Instead of sharing information in traditional environments such as teachers’ lounges and academic conferences, OER Commons offers a way for participants to attach to each educational resource their classroom experiences, teaching or learning strategies, and other knowledge—providing context for others to build upon. In this way, new teachers, non-domain experts (such as parents or others), student learners, and seasoned practitioners have access to shared techniques, notes and recommendations for use, related resources, reviews and quality assessments.

Most importantly, it is a model that allows users to connect content to context, and transforms OER from isolated materials to an integrated process of resource improvement.

For initial themes this project should focus on (eg granularity, reusability), see: Introduction to Learning Objects, and Developing high quality educational resources

What resources could be usefully indexed on OER Commons?
List materials here and reasons why..

OER Commons includes complete courses, homework assignments, lesson plans, labs, etc. that are freely available for instructors and students to use, and for some resources but not all, to modify, remix, or localize to meet the individual needs.

Wikiversity items are very appropriate to include and metadata can be generated for them by following the schema and formatting for OER Commons data. An initial sample of metadata for Wikiversity items has been created by the OER Commons team, including some courses, lessons, learning projects, and collaborative projects, and other types of items may be appropriate as well.

Items with substantial content were chosen over materials with limited content on their main page and/or they were primarily pointing the user to links under development. In addition, a few items, although with currently limited content, presented one or more activities that depend upon the inclusion of user data - like a 'call for participation' that is an interesting model for collaboration and learning.

Using the example of the filmmaking course, records were created for the course "Learning_the_Basics_of_Filmmaking" (very descriptive title) AND the lessons (using their own URL) such as "Thumbnail_Storyboard" as individual items in the system. Extra downloadable materials, such as worksheets don't have much descriptive metadata on their own, and may be better off being noted in a field called "Available Materials" within a lesson or course.

How could indexing resources be best done?
Wikiversity participants are encouraged to add record and keep metadata up to date so that items are more easily found and can be highlighted by the OER Commons network. A metadata template has been proposed. See Templates, Introduction to Learning Objects and Metadata.

How should materials in Wikiversity be tagged?
See: Help:project boxes for a start.

Interested participants

 * Cormaggio talk 14:38, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
 * CQ (talk | email | contribs | stats) 14:43, 26 July 2009 (UTC)