Week 6 - OLDSMOOC & OER

It's week 6 of 9 in OLDSMOOC† and the topic is Curation of content, and one of the major areas is Open Educational Resources (or OER).  I had to go back to last summer, when I was working on the #ioe12 MOOC, and the week that was specifically tackling the topic of OER to see what I wrote then on the topic.

I think my main "complain" about OER is that it, in addition to spending time to find OER resources, you also have to, usually spend, a lot of time on editing and adapting the OER for usage in your own classroom. After all, materials are designed with certain uses, users, and criteria in mind, and those uses, users, and criteria may not match your own LD/ID analysis.  Thus, the process isn't one of Seeking & Deploying, but rather Seeking, Evaluating, Modifying, Testing, Deploying. The process then can become a rabbit hole, where if you jump in too deep, you feel vested in the outcome and you probably don't want to scrap your current work on OER, if you've started working on it, to just create your own materials (or use non-open materials such as publisher resources).

I think for my use case (a blended course or MOOC on mLearning) I may just poke around to see what's available, but since I have a ton of time on my hands, I probably will take some time in looking around :)  What I am mostly hoping to find is OER activities and simulations that may be useful. These are also things that can take too long to develop on one's own, so finding ready made material would be helpful.

† oddly enough you can get a badge for participating for 6 weeks, but not 9. I wonder why...

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