So, looking ahead to Quest 6, we in our guilds will need to collaborate to create a course entirely out of open educational resources. Because we have so little time left, we decided as a class that we would devote everything we do in the remaining quests to work toward our goals for Quest 6.
The course that we as a class originally (more on that later) decided to build is 10th grade social studies--World Civilizations. We will attempt to build this course entirely from OERs that meet the Utah State K-12 Core Curriclum Standards for World Civilizations.
So I decided that for Quest 2 I would just jump into the pool and do my best to find as many OERs as possible that could help us meet the objectives and standards set out in the Utah K-12 Core. This actually turned out to be the first time I've ever made a real attempt to collect a large number of OERs from multiple repositories for a single purpose. Everything that follows here is a description of my first purposeful experience looking for OERs.
If at any point you feel like cutting to the chase, click on this link or just scroll to the end.
MIT OCW
My first question starting out, naturally, was "Where would be the best place to start?" There really are a LOT of places on the web that offer OERs. Some are large repositories, some are small, individually owned websites. MIT OpenCourseWare is well-known, and its name has come up in our classroom discussions a number of times this semester. I decided to go there first.
When I arrived at the OCW site, however, I found myself slightly intimidated by the website interface (again) and didn't really feel like looking searching there. So I left.
OCWFinder
Then I remembered someone in my class mentioning something about "OCWFinder". What a great name! Here I am, wanting to find OCW. Perfect! I went there and began to click on a bunch of tags in the list interface, trying to find something useful.
After about one minute I left. I just didn't feel like OCWFinder gave me enough. Yeah, it helped me search through all the tags for the MIT OCW (and some other) courses, but it didn't give me enough immediately information. To really find anything out from this would require me to go to the MIT OCW site and do a lot more digging there.
Too much clicking.
I know that sounds silly, but any usability tester will tell you that a large number of clicks between your user and their data will be the death of your website. Sorry.
Google - Advanced Search
Having already spent what seemed like an eternity (probably about 5 minutes) I began to grow impatient and defaulted to searching the web in the best way I know how--using Google. If I were to compare searching the web to playing marbles, then Google would be my lucky Steely--shoot it into a pile of marbles and see it plow right through all of them.
Google's "Advanced Search" features allow you to find pages according to usage rights. So, I can find pages that vary in usage rights from "free to use or share" to "free to use, share, or modify, even commercially."
In this situation, Google Advanced search turned out to be immensely useful. I began with search terms taken directly from the state core standards--terms like "hunter gatherer", "world civilizations", "egypt", "mesopotamia river valley", and others. There were plenty of results. And (presumably) all of these search results were somehow marked as having the particular usage rights I was looking for. In addition to a number of personal homepages and organizational wikis, I also noticed that sites like Wikipedia, Scribd, and YouTube were frequently coming up in the search results.
Wikipedia
*Duh*
I didn't even think of trying Wikipedia! Wikipedia was a no-brainer (except that my brain somehow never actually made this connection) because it provides all sorts of useful information that could help someone like me (who doesn't remember a whole lot from his 10th-grade World Civ class) to begin generating a rough content outline.
Now, I know that everytime someone cites Wikipedia they're forced to make apologies and give the appropriate disclaimers, etc., etc. And if the only source one uses when teaching a topic is Wikipedia, then some disclaimers might be in order. However, in terms of domain exploration for an admitted content non-expert, Wikipedia is pretty hard to beat.
Also, by searching Wikipedia for the initial terms from the Utah core standards I was able to find other related terms. These new related terms that I gleaned from Wikipedia seeded other searches within Wikipedia and Google!
Scribd
I mentioned that Scribd.com also came up frequently in my Google searches. I had never really done much with Scribd, but because of its frequent appearances in my search results it seemed like a good time to check it out. Scribd, it turns out, happens to be a large repository of PDFs, Microsoft Office documents, OpenOffice documents, and image files. As such, it seems a likely place to find all course documents of all different kinds.
For example, on Scribd I was able to find a number of individuals' personal notes from world history and civilizations courses. From these notes I was able to learn core terminology, key concepts, key people, and key dates. All this information could be used to seed other searches for more OERs. I was also able to find documentation for a number of class and individual activities, giving suggestions for activities and homework assignments that we might consider using in our course. I also came across several course outlines for world civilizations courses, presumably written by the instructors of these courses.
Google was a good entry point to Scribd. It identified a couple of good resources. However, it soon became apparent that there was more to gain by using Scribd's internal search and organizational abilities than by just searching Scribd with Google.
For example, Scribd allows you to browse all of the documents uploaded by a particular user. Now, let's step through some logic:
- Someone creates a resource.
- I stumble upon it.
- I find it quite useful.
- I find it useful because it gives a lot of good information or teaches something particularly well.
- It has a lot of good information or it teaches well because the person who made it knows the subject matter.
- The person who knows the subject matter might have gained this knowledge throuh their profession or as a hobby.
- If the person is involved in this topic as either a professional or a hobbyist and has taken the time to make one useful resource, then it is not unlikely that they will have produced something else that will be useful to me as well.
So by searching a through this person's whole collection of documents, you are likely to find a number of resources that will be useful to you! The secret is just to find the people who feel as passionately about your subject matter as you do, and find out the kinds of things they've done. This reminds me of some ideas that David Wiley brought back from the Hacking Education conference recently, particularly:
opencontent: Alex Grodd: I don’t want a global (OER) revolution, I want to share with the person down the hall from me. #hackedu
Interesting thought.
YouTube
YouTube also came up frequently in my Google search results. Here you will find thousands of videos relating to just about anything. It also has its own internal search capabilities, and these really came in handy for the fact that they allow you to search through playlists.
A playlist is an enumeration of video resources that someone thought were related to each other for one reason or another. This means that I can search for "india history" in YouTube, and instead of sifting through all of the results myself, I can leverage the sifting work that other people have already done. Because these videos are in lists it is reasonable to assume that the list creator believed these videos had some particular value that others did not. The result is that I can briefly look through the descriptions of videos in a few playlists and find multiple videos relating to my search topic that may very well be of greater quality than other items that may have come up in my YouTube search results list.
Personal Websites
Searching with Google without looking for specific usage rights also returned a lot of promising results, but with a few caveats. There are many professors and teachers on the web who have put their course syllabi, examples, downloadable assignments, class notes, reading comprehension questions, and all sorts of other class materials. These resources typically seem to be of reasonable quality and content. However, the majority of these sites are not licensed by a Creative Commons (or any other license) that lends itself to openness. Thus, if I find a fantastic resource on someone's website, I need to get their permission before I can really use it in any of my projects. Writing an email for each desired resource on an individual basis could become very tedious and time-consuming.
What I Have Learned About Looking for OERs
A few thoughts I picked up from this whole experience, summarized in some clever, catchy little tag lines. (There's a reason I'm not in marketing):
- No Views, No Use. (yūz--gotta make it rhyme, you see) The discoverability issue is a real one. That goes for finding sites, and for finding content within a site once you've entered it. If your open educational resources are not easily discoverable, they won't be used. Period.
- Power to the Proletariat. (No, I'm not a communist.) You might want to consider looking on the average joe's webpage, as well as in the mega-repositories of the elite. Someone's individual collection of OERs may very well be more immediately useful to you than an entire repository, as it may prove to be a more concentrated assortment of exactly what you're looking for.
- OER Like a Car. Pool. (OK, this one didn't work out too well, either). When you're looking for OERs, think car-pooling--talk to people you know to see if they'll let you catch a ride. Sharing OERs within a network of people you know personally and who share common interests is more likely to turn out better results faster.
- Search Smarder, Not Harder. (And yes, I spelled that wrong on purpose.) If you can find a list of resources that someone else has already put together, that will be much more time-efficient than searching through millions of resources by yourself.
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