Activity 8 An OER Course #h817open

Digital Literacies Course

Five week course for undergraduates, new employees, teachers, mature learners, military personnel, and so on.

1. Network Communications
• Internet and protocols
• Web and links
• Bytes, bandwidth, digital formats
2. Network Devices
• ADSL, fibre, wi-fi, Bluetooth
• Wireless access points
• Mobile, tablets, laptops
• Memory, filestore
3. Network Software
• Browsers, downloads
• Searching text, music, video
• Email clients
4. The Cloud
• Social media
• Office cloud apps
• Cloud storage and sharing
5. Simple Programming
• Basic data types
• Sequence, conditional, repetition
• Scripting in AutoHotkey, JavaScript

OER Repositories Search Results

General impressions of locating suitable material from each repository by week:

Ariadne: 1: medium, 2: medium, 3: poor, 4: very poor, 5: medium
Jorum: 1: good, 2: good, 3: good, 4: very poor, 5: medium
Merlot: 1: good, 2: good,3: good, 4: medium:, 5: good
MIT: 1: medium, 2: medium,3: medium, 4: medium:, 5: good
OpenLearn:  1: medium, 2: medium,3: medium, 4: good:, 5: poor
Rice Connexions: 1: poor, 2: poor,3: poor, 4: poor:, 5: good

Difficulties faced included:

• locating a suitable education level for such introductory material; most courses or modules were multi-week or simply too extensive and would need considerable contraction amounting to an effective rewriting of the content
• the significant effort required to drill down to sufficient detail in each OER found by the initial search to determine the suitability of the material
• a worryingly high number of broken links to OERs which highlights the sustainability problem
• some much of the material in the OERs was old and out of date, a big problem for the very fast moving topic of digital literacies

I found that Merlot which gave access to different types of course materials not just whole subjects was the most appropriate source of OERs readily usable without a great deal of detailed rummaging and research.