Join OEWeek!
It’s not too late to join in the conversations and activities happening for Open Education Week (OEWeek) on March 7-11. In this Teaching Tip, we present some of the highlights from OEWeek and how to get involved.
Open education is a movement that supports the free and open sharing of resources for any purpose. Open Educational Resources (OER) are resources that are openly licensed and may be reused, remixed, redistributed, retained or revised. OER can be almost anything–from a textbook to a lesson to an entire course–to help reduce the cost of course materials for students, and allow for co-creative exercises that encourage you and your students to modify the materials and share them out to the world.
Each year OEWeek brings together open education advocates from across the globe to share open assets, learn about latest achievements in open education, and to participate in activities and conversations around open pedagogy. Find out what events are scheduled this week, contribute to the extensive archive of resources, engage in conversations with fellow participants, or look for a resource to use in your course.
The following highlights are from this year’s OEWeek Resources that have been submitted by people and groups across the world. These are just a few examples; find many more on the OEWeek site.
H5P is a tool that lets you easily create interactive content elements for your online course or textbook including branch scenarios, flash cards, interactive video, audio recordings, accordion content, charts and interactive hotspots for visual presentation of information (see examples here). UAF has an institutional license for H5P so you can use it right inside your Canvas course. The H5P Kitchen is a site by BCcampus that provides extensive information about how to use H5P in OER creation and in any educational context. Also, you can discuss ideas for using H5P in the OEWeek forum.
Alan’s Box of Image Search Tricks
This resource was created by Alan Levine (@cogdog) and includes tips and resources for finding openly licensed images to use for any purpose. He also offers tools he has created for finding Creative Commons licensed images from a Google Search, through openverse, and flickr without having to go into advanced search. If you search for a lot of open licensed images for your course or for any reason check out this resource.
Mystery Box flickr photo by mikecogh shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license
Using Wikipedia to improve learning
A great way to get students engaged in connecting and co-creating with others outside the classroom is to involve them in a project to improve or critique a topic on Wikipedia. Join a conversation about how to use Wikipedia as a tool for learning. This conversation is a valuable resource with tips for getting started. Relatedly, Wikipedia in the Classroom is a teacher training program that you can attend and/or consult the Teacher’s Training Guide (on the same page), which includes information about Wikipedia and has excellent ideas for integrating Wikipedia into your class.
There are many repositories of OER such as OER Commons and Merlot and open media repositories such as WikiMedia. Now we can add the Open Content Toolkit to our list for content resources. It offers curated lists of links to open online digital resources sites focused on many topics based on type of resource: documents, images, media, artwork, scientific publications, and more. Using these resources, educators can supplement teaching materials in creative ways and students can use them for classroom projects.
CC & OER Training Arena for Education Superheroes
UAF’s contribution to OEWeek is the CC & OER Training Arena for Open Education Superheroes. The Arena is a virtual space where OER faculty can learn more about topics to help in the fight for open education to ultimately banish high-cost materials from higher education. Learn about Creative Commons licensing, copyright, fair use, finding and sharing OER.
How to set up subtitle-a-thons for education
A way to engage students with audiovisual heritage, subtitle-a-thons are a crowdsourced way that the public can contribute to archival audiovisual clips and make them more broadly accessible to everyone. Educators can use this tool to help students engage with language and heritage during sprint-like events. Read more here.
LibreTexts – Commons & Conductor
LibreTexts provides an online platform for constructing, customizing and sharing OER and LibreCommons brings all the LibreText libraries together in one place. Find OER here, everything from animated chemistry models to lesson ideas to full textbooks.
