Open Educational Resources for School Teachers from Developing Nations



'''This course concluded on May 2nd, 2011. A new detailed OER introductory course is being planned for August 2011.'''

A new course blog has been created. This blog will provide you with step-by-step instructions to complete your assignments.

Course objective
Introductory Open Educational Resources (OER) course is focused mainly for elementary school teachers from developing nations. After this course participants will be able to:


 * recognise open and free educational resources online
 * understand the different license policies
 * learn how to reuse, create new, remix and share/distribute educational resource
 * be a member of the OER community and spread the awareness of OER



Course length and Registration
4 weeks ( 4 classes, each 2 to 3 hrs long. Total - not more than 12 Hours)

Target audience
Anyone interested to learn the basics of searching, creating, re-using and sharing license free English resources for the purpose of educating the elementary and secondary school students. This course is prepared keeping in mind that all elementary school teachers from developing nations might now have computers and internet access at their homes, but still are willing to learn by finding internet access at an educational institution or internet centres.

Participants
The course is intended to commence from April 4th, 2011. The course facilitator plans to start the course after there are at least 20 participant registrations. To view a list of registered participants, visit the participants page.

Language
This course is focused towards school teachers from developing nations teaching in English medium schools, hence this course will be in English language. The participants are encouraged and are most welcome to search, remix and re-use educational materials in other languages that are meant to be re-used and re-distributed. urdu

Course Assignments
Participants are encouraged to open their own blog or a course community discussion page (common blog space) where in they are expected to submit their assignments and share opinions and comments about the suggested readings. The participants are required to invest at least 2-3 hours of work each week for this course.

Class meetings
This class will meet semi-synchronously online. This means, the first and fourth weekly class will be synchronous online meeting (skype conference with participants at an agreed time) and the second and third will be asynchronous online meeting (online self study time).

Course Schedule
Week 1. Introduction to OER (Online synchronous meeting) Class 1- online synchronous meeting
 * What are Open_educational_resources (OER)?
 * Brief history of OER.
 * Definition of OER.
 * Introduction to Creative Commons licenses and understanding Copyright.

Assignment: You can email your answers to the course facilitator or choose to post it on your blog or the community web blog.
 * Create an individual blog or a community blog at wordpress, or at blogger.
 * Write one post blog (one or two paragraphs) introducing yourself (who you are and what you teach) and what you are looking forward to learn from this course.
 * Read the suggested readings and write one page, introducing OER to a school that you know, which does not use OER.
 * Write half a page talking about the main characteristics of OER.
 * Watch the clips/short videos on this website and discuss on your blog/common webspace what you think about them.

Suggested readings:
 * 1) http://wikieducator.org/OER_Handbook/educator
 * 2) Open_educational_resources
 * 3) http://www.col.org/SiteCollectionDocuments/Introducing_Copyright_online_edition.pdf - by Julien Hofman and Commonwealth of Learning, 2009.
 * 4) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/

Week 2. OER Authoring Tools (Asynchronous meeting) Class 2 – asynchronous meeting
 * Introduction to OER Authoring tools by Christopher Pappas.
 * Introduction to LeMill and Wikiversity.

Assignment:

You can email your answers to the course facilitator or choose to post it on your blog or the community web blog.
 * Please register yourself in LeMill and Wikiversity.
 * Find and list at least 4/5 other open educational resources websites like LeMill that are relevant/applicable to your subject area, list these on your blog or group blog.
 * Write one blog post about your favourite authoring tool and its features, why you think it is better than the others.

Suggested readings:
 * 1) http://lemill.net/content/webpages/overview-of-lemill
 * 2) http://lemill.net/content/webpages/lemill-faq
 * 3) Help:The_original_tour_for_newcomers
 * 4) Introduction

Week 3. Reusing OER and Open Content (Asynchronous meeting) Class 3 – asynchronous meeting
 * Remixing lesson plans and distributing it.
 * How to create and re-use resources in Curriki and LeMill
 * Open License compatibility issues, Creative Commons image collections of flickr for use in OER.

Assignment: You can email your answers to the course facilitator or choose to post it on your blog or the community web blog.
 * Find at least 5 educational materials that are relevant to your subject and syllabus and submit/post it them on your blog or community web space.
 * Create your own or re-mix at least 3 free and open educational resource relevant to your subject area.
 * Read the third suggested reading for this week and write a post on your blog about the different CC licenses.

Suggested readings:
 * 1) http://www.curriki.org/
 * 2) http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Coll_Group_OERi-OpenEducationalResourcesintegration/RemixModule3?bc=
 * 3) http://www.oerafrica.org/ResourceDownload.aspx?assetid=317&userid=-1

Week 4. Implementing OER in developing nations (Online synchronous meeting) Class 4 - online synchronous meeting
 * Implementing OER in developing nations.
 * Feedback and discussion.

Assignment:
 * Participants are requested to read the suggested readings for this week and write their opinion on blog/group blog about how OER can be implemented successfully in developing countries.
 * Participants are hereby requested to write one post on your blog/group blog about what they have learnt from this course and how they will use this knowledge in their classes.

Suggested readings:
 * 1) http://cnx.org/content/m14422/latest/ by Sunil Kumar Singh

Recognition
Participants who have submitted all the assignments and upon completion of these 4 week course will be awarded a certificate recognising your understanding of introductory course in OER, from Tallinn University, Estonia. This online course is endorsed by the Institute of Informatics, Tallinn University.

Additional useful links

 * 1) http://www.sciencenetlinks.com/index.php
 * 2) http://www.readwritethink.org/
 * 3) http://www.oercommons.org/
 * 4) http://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm
 * 5) http://www.wetheteachers.com/
 * 6) http://oer.issuelab.org/research
 * 7) http://www.100people.org/lesson_plans.php
 * 8) http://ck-12.com/flexbook/
 * 9) http://www.khanacademy.org/
 * 10) http://www.collegeopentextbooks.org/

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Hans Põldoja - my thesis supervisor - and Sirje Virkus - my teacher - for their guidance. Without their ideas and help I would not have plunged this deep into the fascinating world of Open Educational Resources. Comment added by User:Nithinlaxman (talk), on or before 12:48, 17 March 2011