Open Educational Resources are the result of a different approach to education: the focus in on sharing, improving and reusing educational materials created by people (not only super-experts) who are willing to let knowledge spread and be used by anyone.
What are Open Educational Resources and why they could be a great support for teachers at every level? According to UNESCO, they are “any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license. The nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt and re-share them. OERs range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video and animation.”
In this MOOC you will find:
- the basics about Open Educational Resources;
- different perspectives about key issues;
- some tips to try OERs in your course, a set of tools we will provide you, some useful resources shared by other institutions and OERs workforce.
In this MOOC you'll meet some of the greatest experts in the field, who choose every day to openly share their experience and their deep knowledge with everyone: Anant Agarwal (CEO at edX and Professor at MIT, USA), Jane-Frances Agbu (Head of OERs Unit at NOUN, Nigeria), Ariane Dumont (Professor at Western Switzerland University of Applied Sciences, CH), Cable Green (Open Education Director at Creative Commons, USA), Rory McGreal (Professor and UNESCO/Commonwealth of Learning Chairholder in Open Educational Resources at Athabasca University, Canada), António Moreira Teixeira (President of EDEN), Joseph Pickett (Publication Director at MIT OpenCourseWare, USA), Susanna Sancassani (Managing Director at Politecnico di Milano – METID, Italy), Robert Schuwer (Lector OER at Fontys University, Netherland), Katsusuke Shigeta (Associate Professor at Hokkaido University, JAPAN) and Andrea Zanni (former President at Wikimedia Italia). We also had the chance to add to the additional materials a valuable contribution from Martin Ebner (Graz University of Technology).
The course is structured in 5 weeks:
Week 1 - Experience
Week 2 - Reflection
Week 3 - Theoretical Background
Week 4 - Let's Try
The pedagogical approach adopted in this MOOC
You’ll have the chance to choose among three different levels of involvement, even if there is no explicit distinction in the contents, considering the effort you may put in it: reading and viewing, communication and production paths are available.
Week 0 is an introduction to the MOOC, its structure and the main subject we are dealing with.
From week 1 to week 4 you’ll find the core part of the MOOC, about OERs: you’ll start from concrete experiences and, through a deep reflection on them and a guided analysis of the theoretical background, you’ll reach the “hands on” part, in which you’ll have the chance to start using this approach for your own course’s design.
Finally yet importantly, there is a final section, which focuses on the pedagogical approach applied in this MOOC as a whole. This section has been designed and developed by Université Numérique Ingénierie et Technologie. In this section you’ll have the chance, as a teacher, to reflect on the overall design phase of a course, as a meta-level.
