Activity 8: An OER course

 

Not being a teacher I had no idea of a topic or learner group, so thought I would go for something really simple!

Digital Skills
Learners:  mature learners, no previous computing skills
Topics to be covered
First Principles – switching on and off, use of the mouse, file structures
Use of Word – typing into a document, corrections, spellcheck, clipboard
Use of Styles, Formats, Fonts
Inserting wordart, pictures and text positioning
Using tables in Word

However, when I started to look at the suggested resources, I had problems! 

Because of the low expectation of my proposed ‘course’, not many of the resources were of use.  There was also a problem in trying to access the possible material; retrieval was very laborious and time consuming, a lot of material was out of date, and the Jorum site in particular had a lot of non-English material.
Notes on the resources follow (again, due to the nature of the chosen 'course', the suggested way of commenting on the material wasn't really relevant.
⁶⁰Ariadne
Mostly maths based resources, only one or two that looked like basic level stuff; when tried to access, resource was no longer available (2004 era?)
Jorum ⁶¹
Seems to be Further Education, Higher Education, and Research – not really relevant for learner group.  Very slow to load – got fed up with waiting
Merlot ⁶²
Good ‘source’ for a syllabus for an elementary course – but no actual resources to be used!  Science and Technology pages seem to be aimed at undergraduate level, lot of biology.  Web pages very slow to refresh, kept losing them!
MIT ⁶³
Good website - easy to use, quick to load.  Unfortunately all too high powered (undergrad and graduate level)
OpenLearn   (OU website)
Range of Computing Courses, but not sure right for the stuff that was envisaged.  Would need to alter the proposed syllabus to make use of the course material.⁶⁴
Rice Connexions⁶⁵
Again, a good looking site, but designed for undergrad and graduate studies. (A part of Rice University, so not surprising)

If I wanted to use OER, then I would have had to drastically alter what I was thinking of teaching.  Some of the sites were very good, but were mainly undergraduate and graduate level.  And finding the resources was quite time consuming; some sites did not have very good search engines.  It would seem to be better to approach the construction of a module from the resources up, rather than trying to fit resources to a particular syllabus.  This makes it difficult to then fit a module into a larger course.