Woruldhord, Ancestral voices, the Great War and more.

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One of the main conclusions from our Mosaic project (which developed an online course, ‘Ancestral voices: the earliest English literature’,  primarily from pre-existing content and made it freely available for reuse and adaption) was that the best way to get your OERs used is to make them as discoverable as possible, by putting them or linking to them from as many places as possible, and especially those places where your target audience are likely to look.  To this end, while we submitted the outputs of that project to JORUM as required by JISC, we also made them freely available through our Open Moodle site, and have been pursuing other opportunities to share and use these materials ever since.

Building on this we are now really pleased to be able to contribute the course to a new project here at Oxford, the JISC funded  Woruldhord project which “sets out to collect together into an online hoard, digital objects related to the teaching, study, or research of Old English and the Anglo-Saxon period of history”.

This project builds on the work of OUCS in community collections from the The Great War Archive and in OERs with OpenSpires.  As  we already use outputs from both of these in our courses,  it is really good to be able to contribute content back in the opposite direction.

As I type this I realise that it is all sounding terribly inwards facing, but while all the examples here are from Oxford sources, this is in fact indicative of the wider growth of truly excellent academic (and non academic) resources on the web and the extent to which our course authors are using them in their materials.  While we are still a long way from the vision of pervasive reuse that I suspect many had a few years ago, at least in our online courses authors are as likely to direct students to an image from flikr, a project database, an online text book, a digitised primary source, a Google maps mash-up or even a learning object, as an article in a journal or a textbook.  The process is slow, but reuse is growing and the more projects like these that take place the more compelling the reasons for reusing digital content is becoming.

This entry was posted in JISC, Mosaic, Open Educational Resources, OpenSpires, short courses by Marion Manton. Bookmark the permalink.

About Marion Manton

I amSenior Manager: Learning Design and co-manager of TALL with David White. Previous to that I was eLearning Research Project Manager. As well as the day to day running of TALL I am responsible for the ensuring that all TALL programmes are best practice examples of learning online for their audience. I work closely with course teams to specify the learning they want to achieve with their programme and to identify the best uses of technology to do this. I also maintain currency with the latest research in eLearning, to ensure that TALL is aware of and exploits the best current knowledge of what works in terms of effective eLearning. My particular interests are in effective pedagogical models for different learning scenarios and how best to facilitate these by the appropriate use of technology. As well as the development of effective tools and processes to help academics identify these and translate knowledge of their subject and teaching into high quality online learning.