Source : On line open course TESSA Making teacher education relevant for 21st century Africa
Finding OER that are useful to you can be difficult. It is helpful to have some criteria to help you decide whether an OER is likely to help you.
You will need to consider the view of learning that informs the OER and whether this is in line with the shifts in the teaching and learning processes that you want to support.
The TESSA OER have been through a process of critical review and quality assurance, but this is not necessarily the case for others.
In the Open University course Creating open educational resources, a useful OER is described as being:
- findable – it can be in multiple locations, making it easy to locate
- clearly described, so that you can quickly assess whether it will be useful for you and/or your teacher learners
- clearly licensed (usually through Creative Commons), which tells you if you can adapt the OER and other conditions of use
- from a source you trust
- used/recommended by people like you
- easy to modify for your students
- free-standing, so it does not assume knowledge of other resources and is easier to integrate into a course or learning episode
- imperfect – it just needs to work for you and/or your teacher learners.
Activity 4.2: Exploring OER (Allow approximately 45 minutes)
Visit one or two of the websites below and look for OER that you could use with your teacher learners, or that you might encourage them to use.
TESS-India
Khan Academy
OpenLearn
Commonwealth of Learning
Identify a repository that you particularly like and, referring to the criteria above, make notes in your study notebook about why you like it.