Composing educational resources




 * In some areas, composing educational resources has come a long way from a black board, borrowing books from a library, photocopying, or creating over head projection transparencies. Anyone who has had more than a superficial search of the Internet knows there are more educational resources than ever before! In most areas including "developed regions" however, accessing the Internet is a real challenge. This does not have to mean we forget about using Internet based resources in education, it just means we get smart on how!..


 * The questions in this course then are:


 *  How can we more effectively find resources that are free for reuse?
 *  How can we efficiently manage all the resources that we find?
 *  How can we compose educational resources that are accessible and reusable?

This course has been developed by staff in the Educational Development Centre of Otago Polytechnic, based on the Wikiversity course Composing Free and Open Online Educational Resources. This course is designed to help both formal and informal learners access and interpret models, research, and develop professional expertise in the composition of educational resources. After completing this course people should be confident in locating and composing educational resources, and/or be able to critique and offer advice to other people in the process of composing educational resources.

To join this course: Participation in this course is free. The next facilitated session is TBA. To join, simply complete the tasks in the Orientation section of this page. Alternatively, you can start and finish at any time, working through the schedule at a pace that suits you. If you think you will benefit from receiving focused and personal learning support, assessment services, or a certificate in recognition for your participation, please consider enrolling as a formal participant. You can inquire about formal enrollment by emailing: TBA

= Objectives =


 * 1) Searching for free and open educational resources
 * 2) Managing lists of educational resources
 * 3) Composing and republishing educational resources in an accessible and reusable way

= Class Meetings =



During facilitated periods of this course, regular online meetings will be held to discuss the course, its topics and assignments. Each new meeting will be announced on the course blog at least 7 days prior, and recordings and notes will be made available on the meetings page of this wiki

= Assignments =

Assignment 1: Topical reading and blogging
Follow the course schedule, read the assigned material, participate in any events, and post notes to your blog with responses to questions and tasks in the topic schedule. You should also post to your blog progress reports on your assignments. Your blogging should demonstrate your understanding of the assigned reading material and events, and should include original thoughts, synthesis and references. Don't just summarize readings or events. Making connections between the weekly topics, or previous blogging (of your own or of other participants) is strongly encouraged.


 * Help in getting started with blogs

To keep up with the contributions of other participants, you may wish to set up an (RSS) news reader and subscribe to their blogs. This will save you a lot of time by not having to go to each blog. News readers are a very efficient and simple way to establish a connection with others in the course, and to stay up to date with what they are doing.


 * Help in getting started with an RSS news reader

Assignment 2: Develop and publish a library of educational resources
Use search and management techniques learned in this course to compose a collection of reusable educational resources to do with your own subject area. All resources should have non restrictive copyrights and can include things as simple as images, through to video and audio as well as other collections. Your collection should be publicly available and online with usefully short descriptions for each item. For example: Here is my own collection of resources I used to compose this course.

Assignment 3: Develop and publish an educational resource
Use production techniques learned during this course to compose your own educational resource. Your resource will use text, images, audio and video, and it will be usable both on and off-line and in both digital and non digital formats. Your resource will also include content sampled from other legitimate sources, and have the appropriate attributions and acknowledgments.

= Schedule =

Orientation

 * A week spent orientating yourself into the course, the commitment required, the assignments and what else is involved. For those new to this way of learning online, this week will seem daunting. Get through it and the rest of the course will flow for you nicely.

To do
 * Please try to complete the following tasks before the first course meeting (Date TBA)


 * 1) Set up a blog for your weekly work in this course. If you already have a blog, you are welcome to use that so long as you can clearly indicate what posts are for this course. If you are new to blogging, refer to Blogger help resources.
 * 2) Post to your blog a little bit about you and why you are joining in with the course.
 * 3) Introduce yourself to the course by adding your blog's web address to the participant blog list
 * 4) Prepare your computer and attend the first of our regular meetings on the 31st of July.

Extra resources
 * resources for getting started with blogging
 * Video: RSS in Plain English
 * Get your computer ready for Elluminate web conferencing
 * What is RSS ?

Finding, creating and publishing texts
Free media repository Free-content news Dictionary and thesaurus Collection of quotations Free textbooks and manuals Free-content library Directory of species Free learning materials and activities
 * Commons
 * Wikinews
 * Wiktionary
 * Wikiquote
 * Wikibooks
 * Wikisource
 * Wikispecies
 * Wikiversity
 * Archive.org texts facsimile copies of free and out of copyright texts

Finding, creating and publishing pictures

 * A picture says a thousand words

To do
 * 1) You should write only one (1) blog post but do all the things below:
 * 2) Study the links below, and search for images of your home town.
 * 3) Use a digital camera to take photos in your home town. Choose one or two pictures that can be used in learning resources.
 * 4) Editing the photos that you have chosen (crop, correct exposure and white balance, add saturation, sharpen).
 * 5) Join Flickr and upload the photos that you selected. Describe photos with tags, place them on a map and add a Creative Commons license.
 * 6) View one image you have loaded to flickr and download and print each size.
 * 7) Upload one photo to Wikimedia Commons.
 * 8) Search for your home town photos on Wikimedia Commons and Flickr. Did you find similar photos to your own? Were these under reusable license?
 * 9) Write a blog post where you summarize what you learned from the task. Add links to the photos that you have uploaded and found online.

FINDING
 * Open Clip Art Free icons and clip art
 * Cool Image Bank Free images for any use (but derivative)
 * Every Stock Photo Search engine for free images with various licenses
 * JHSPH OpenCourseWare Image Library Health education images with non commercial restriction
 * Flickr Creative Commons Images stored on Flickr with various Creative Commons licenses
 * Wikimedia Commons Multi media used in the Wikimedia projects

CREATING
 * Digital Photography Composition Tips Composition tips by Digital Photography School
 * Quality images guidelines Image quality guidelines in Wikimedia Commons
 * Gimp Free and fully featured image editor for Windows, Mac and Linux
 * Paint.NET Free and simple image editor for Windows
 * Picasa Photo management and basic editing software by Google
 * Seashore Free image editor for Mac

PUBLISHING

Start networking

 * Tell the others what do you think about their work, help promote the upcoming conference

Assignments:
 * Presentation
 * You should write only one (1) blog post but do many other things, too
 * Visit each other blogs and comment the posts in there.
 * Comment at least one blog post in each participants blogs.
 * Write your own reflective thoughts about the course and the class. What did you learn?

Course mini conference



 * Over this week you present your work at a course mini conference and attend the presentations of other participants

Estimated time: one week - 29 June to 5 July 2009.

To do


 * This is when you complete assignment 2.


 * 1. Confirm details of your event listed in the /course mini conference/.


 * 2. Assist in promotion of the events and in getting people to attend.


 * 3. Present your work at the course mini conference and attend as many if not all other events in the conference.


 * 4. Help document the conference by posting commentary about other presentations to your blog.

Extra resources

=HELP=

Remember, those who are formally enrolled in this course with Otago Polytechnic have access to learning support services. Please contact the facilitators for help with the course content and assessments. Please contact Otago Polytechnic's Community Learning Centres in Forth St, Princes St Mosgiel or Alexandra Community Learning Centres for help with computer and internet access as well as technical assistance with blogs, RSS and related Internet research and communication skills. The Bill Robertson Library is available for support with information research. And the Student Learning Centre in F Block of the Forth Street Campus is available for one to one tutorial support in all of the above. For those who are formally enrolled but have limited access to these services, when in New Zealand please call 0800 762 786 and ask to speak to any of these services.


 * Student Service Desk for technical computing assistance, e.g., Elluminate (computer conferencing) is available from Otago Polytechnic by phone and email. Check out the website for the list of services.
 * Phone: 0800 765 948
 * Email: itssATtekotagoDOTacDOTnz

Ensure you tell them your name, lecturer's name, name of the course, and a brief description of the problem. They may ask for your username as well.

=This course is also used in=
 * Teaching and Learning Online
 * Tertiary learning and teaching
 * Flexible learning
 * Facilitating online communities

=Acknowledgements=

This course has been developed by the Educational Development Centre of Otago Polytechnic drawing inspiration from the Introduction to Open Education course by David Wiley and Composing free and open educational resources by Wikiversity users has influenced to the design of this course.

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