The school year is drawing to a close, and some of you may have started creating a list of course resources for the next semester. Have you thought about teaching with Open Educational Resources? How do you go about choosing them?
Your institution may subscribe to many well-known OER databases that would help to alleviate the common issues of quality and to license when choosing OERs. Another way to look at OERs is to see them as a pedagogical tool. As DeRosa and Robinson write: “By replacing a static textbook — or other stable learning material — with one that is openly licensed, faculty have the opportunity to create a new relationship between learners and the information they access in the course. Instead of thinking of knowledge as something students need to download into their brains, we start thinking of knowledge as something continuously created and revised.”
As many of you know, the Café Learn’s platform has at its core the dynamic Idea Exchange – a virtual space for instructors to add and curate course material sharing them with other instructors. Here you can discover activities and tips from your colleagues who may teach in the same discipline at another college. You can also add your own content. In addition, the design of the Idea Exchange allows you to use this material in a pedagogically sound way by integrating a piece of content into an activity that would appear in your students learning path linked to your particular learning outcomes, or based on your students’ progress in class.
We welcome your thoughts on the use of open educational resources in your classrooms.
Blog post by Tatiana Tatarchevskiy, Café Learn Community Engagement Manager
Your institution may subscribe to many well-known OER databases that would help to alleviate the common issues of quality and to license when choosing OERs. Another way to look at OERs is to see them as a pedagogical tool. As DeRosa and Robinson write: “By replacing a static textbook — or other stable learning material — with one that is openly licensed, faculty have the opportunity to create a new relationship between learners and the information they access in the course. Instead of thinking of knowledge as something students need to download into their brains, we start thinking of knowledge as something continuously created and revised.”
As many of you know, the Café Learn’s platform has at its core the dynamic Idea Exchange – a virtual space for instructors to add and curate course material sharing them with other instructors. Here you can discover activities and tips from your colleagues who may teach in the same discipline at another college. You can also add your own content. In addition, the design of the Idea Exchange allows you to use this material in a pedagogically sound way by integrating a piece of content into an activity that would appear in your students learning path linked to your particular learning outcomes, or based on your students’ progress in class.
We welcome your thoughts on the use of open educational resources in your classrooms.
Blog post by Tatiana Tatarchevskiy, Café Learn Community Engagement Manager
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