OER Inventory Challenge

You can find my OER inventory here.

Given the nature of my course, “Another World Is Possible: Neoliberal Globalization and Social Change,” the reuse of OER designed by other educators was rather limited for this learning pathway. This course, aimed for adult learners and designed to develop critical thinking in the current social, economic and political worlds, largely seeks that learners navigate freely on the Internet looking for information. To do this, they are offered links to various materials, among which they must choose those that best fit their interests. After reading, listening or watching the resources selected, they must start their independent search on the net to expand their information according to their preferences.

To make an inventory of those first links, I sought educational materials related to the topics of this learning pathway —Collective intelligence, Cultural Creatives, The Empathic Civilization and the Economy for the Common Good—, but I must say that I almost did not find resources for possible use by hosting them in WikiEducator, since most of them had no CC BY nor CC BY-SA license. Anyway, I suppose I can use them as links to open access resources hosted on external sites.

In short, I’ve discovered the benefits of OER search through those sources offered by the DS4OER course in this field. They have opened me many doors for searching possible educational resources.

I’m including below one of the most striking resources that I’ve found, a slide presentation about The New Sharing Economy, by Mitya Voskresensky (under license CC BY-NC-ND, in SlideShare).

Video Remix Challenge

The task for this session of the DS4OER course has taken me a long time, even though I already had some knowledge of video editing. The problem is that I have a perfectionist slant and, just selecting videos, music and, above all, pictures, I have devoted several hours. However, I finished quite satisfied with my work, a video on the sociological phenomenon of Cultural Creatives, explained by the sociologist who made the discovery, Dr. Paul H. Ray. Moreover, now I have a new educational resource for my open online course “Another World Is Possible” (AWIP15).

The use of audiovisual materials as educational resources has for me more advantages than disadvantages. It is true that sometimes they can distract students from more important aspects of their learning, but it is also true that a good video can convey more information in less time than reading the equal amount of information through texts.

What has been new for me was the previous making of a storyboard for my video. I never made this before editing, and yet I found it very rewarding. On the other hand, the storyboarding has made easier for me the later editing work. I was able to make the assembly faster than in previous works. Here you have a pdf from my storyboard.

My only problem has been while trying to manage the Creative Commons license in YouTube. A message appeared saying that my video had a notification of third parties copyright, when all the elements that I have remixed in my video belong to Public Domain or have a CC-BY, attribution 2.0. Following the thread, I’ve finally found that the notification was about the music, but the music I used has a CC-BY 3.0, as you can see here. Finally, I challenged before YouTube their notification of copyright.

Anyway, here you are the result of my video remix challenge.