Distract yourself with free materials from the Open University
Via @skepticbarista I’ve found a collection of Open Educational Resources from the Open University. They’re listed at their Open Learn site, and there are stack of interesting courses to browse from Introductory to Master’s level. There’s all sorts of things that make this interesting. There’s the variety of the material from Aberdulais Falls (a case study in Welsh heritage) to Zoology. There’s the quality of the material. There’s also the extra element. It might not be a taught course, but there’s still thought in how you can use the material.
There’s fora, learning groups and a tool called FlashVlog for recording video diaries. That seems above and beyond the call of duty for OER material. The whole thing is CC licenced, so I had been thinking about working through a module here. The difficulty is that if you see the full list of courses, it’s a bit like being let loose in a sweet-shop.
Google+
That’s actually one of the smaller repositories of free online OU material. There’s also stuff on the OU’s YouTube channel, and if you have iTunes, there’s the OU’s page on iTunesU, which you can get to from here, and has lots of av material, coimplete with transcripts. A lot of that material (though not the transcripts, can also now be found at the OU’s Podcast page. Also, some courses have their own websites where futher taster material can be found.
I use these resources all the time, and they’re very useful in teaching.
Do you think I could persuade them to pay me to act as a guinea pig to try out these materials to make sure they are accessible and usable by someone with no OU contact?
It’s a nice thought isn’t it?
It is a great example for them to set though. At the Centre for Interdisciplinary Science in Leicester the target is to make all new courses available as open teaching material as standard.
Hi Alun
Glad to hear you like the site. We’re about to relaunch OpenLearn to pull all our OER content (which as Tony rightly points out exists on a number of platforms) into one site. Fantastic to hear your target to make all courses available. Impressive. I’ll be at the JISC OER event in London on Friday — if you happen to be there give me a shout @lauradee.
@rwmg Yes please. We have run several accessibility and usability tests on the site and have another stage of testing planned in for early October which we’ll be recruiting users for. Only problem — you’d need to come to Milton Keynes in UK — not sure we can do remote user testing although I could ask. The new site will launch in beta so we’ll be looking to gather feedback over the coming months for the next iteration.
I must admit I’m tempted, but I don’t think a trip to Milton Keynes is really on the cards. Are you sure you couldn’t persuade the powers that be that it’s necessary to test them in an area where internet access to materials is the only practical option?