TALL blog

As we kick off the Mosaic project (trying to develop a short course in early English literature using at a majority of preexisting content) I am trying to develop a list of places to start looking for this content that we want to re-use. I know that Sandie (our subject matter expert) has already identified lots of excellent resources using her knowledge of the discipline, but with the growth of OERs (Open Educational Resources) and portals and repositories to access them, I should hopefully not just be able to identify some likely looking content, but also content that will be easy for us to reuse – in terms of permission and copyright.

I have been clipping this area for about 3 years so had a list of about 65 things tagged free content and about 75 tagged OERs. A lot of these were the same thing tagged in different contexts or commentaries on the phenomenon more generally, rather than links to specific content, this got rid of a lot of links. A lot were very specifically K12 or focussed on a specific discipline that was not our course (at the moment it seems to me there is a lot more on the sciences and social sciences than on the humanities). There seemed to be a lot of initiatives that had a very impressive front page but very little behind it, or ones that did have a lot of content but clearly even I (as a non subject specialist) could tell there would be nothing appropriate for our course.

So now I have a list of things I want Sandie to check out and …..it consists of 12 things…..

To be fair some of these are VERY big portals to a lot of other content, but I am kind of disappointed. Also having had a quick search around I am already almost totally certain that it is sites that are not as explicitly focussed on reusable learning content that are going to be the most useful. Sandie will be doing more digging on this in the next few weeks, and will let us know what she finds. In the meantime here are the links i think it is worth Sandie following up:

1. Intute –http://www.intute.ac.uk/artsandhumanities/
2. The OU –http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/
3. Jorum –http://www.jorum.ac.uk/
4. Merlot –http://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm
5. Rice Connexions –http://cnx.org/
6. MIT OCW –http://ocw.mit.edu
7. Open courseware consortium – http://www.ocwconsortium.org
8. OER Commons – http://www.oercommons.org/
9. Jisc Collections –http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/
10. Directory of Open Access Journals –http://www.doaj.org/
11. UNESCO List of Open Educational Resources –http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org/index.php?title=OER_useful_resources
12. Google OCW search – http://opencontent.org/googleocw/

So if you know somewhere else we should be looking let us know.

This entry was posted by Marion Manton on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 4:47 pm and is filed under JISC, Mosaic, Open source, research, reuse, short courses. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.