The movement toward creating and using open education resources–OERs–has been percolating for years, and a vast amount of open materials for education is now easily accessible for online course developers to incorporate in their designs.
But some key questions persist about mining this growing resource for online courses. Campus Technology‘s recent conversation with Michael Cottam, Rio Salado College‘s associate dean over instructional design and new program development, helps shed some light on how OERs may be better evaluated in the future so that course developers can leverage open resources more effectively.
Mary Grush: What’s important for instructional designers to think about today, especially as we consider the latest wave of online learners–learners for whom there are unprecedented choices in online instruction?
Michael Cottam: When we talk in general about online access and instructional technology to help an increasingly diverse body of online students reach their educational goals, the realm of open education resources, or OERs, is one of the areas that always comes up. It’s a movement that’s been gathering steam for years, and it seems to be stronger now than ever.
There are many institutions and organizations that make course materials open to anyone who can access the Internet–take for example, what you find with OpenCourseWare. These are often materials from top-tier institutions like MIT and Yale, and the list of OCW Consortium colleges and universities is impressive and growing. Other higher education institutions have made entire course offerings, lecture series, syllabi, and other materials and learning activities available online in an open environment–so that if you want to learn something, you don’t necessarily have to sign up for a course. And then there’s the Khan Academy, placing thousands of videos online, on anything from basic math to economics to biology and more–small, digestible tutorials that anyone can access at any time.
So, as you are developing an online course for your institution, there’s a wealth of material already online under Creative Commons licensing that you can access, link to, share, and incorporate into your class. And by leveraging what people have already done, you can offset some of the effort and certain costs of developing your class.