Over the past couple of years I have become increasingly interested in Open Education Resources (OER). Though I have to admit that I often find the task of finding OER resources for use in my own classes more challenging than it should be – having to plough through pages of results from an Jorum search, for example, looking for resources that actually match what I need for my class.
As far as releasing my own resources, over the past few years I’ve increasingly been posting Creative Commons licensed images and documents to Flickr, Scribd and Slideshare – though these are often related more to my research & development work than my teaching. This year I finally took some steps towards sharing my teaching resources with the wider public.
My 3D graphics classes rely heavily on copyright material from books written by others – which makes it a challenge to share what I’ve been doing. This last year, however, I started a blog on 3d game development where I could post some of my own additional lab and lecture materials. The very first post on Getting Started with GLTools details how to install the required software. I included notes on getting the libraries to work with the latest version of Visual Studio in an embedded Scribd document – which has now been viewed over 6,000 times, while the linked zip files have been downloaded over 1,000 times. I had around 50 students in my graphics classes, so I’ve been able to reach 20 to 100 times as many people as I actually taught – simply by placing some of my materials online. I didn’t post the notes to a repository, in the vague hope that another tutor might find the materials and think them useful. Instead, I simply posted the materials online in the form most convenient to me and let other students, tutors, professionals, or whoever, find them however they might.
In the second semester I took over a first year Computing Systems class – this was a bit of a challenge as it required a substantial rewrite as the class had to be applicable to a much wider audience than previously. I wanted to provide much greater context and to make the material much more approachable and up to date. I looked to Jorum and existing text-books, but generally the available materials were aimed squarely at Computer Science and Engineering students – too much depth, not enough context – and it would have been a major task to revise the material to suit. Instead I opted to pick a very general book that had broad coverage of material and provide additional depth myself through tutorials, lab exercises and additional notes. This would still have been impossible without Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, which respectively provided a great deal of information for use in lectures and images for the presentations. I could also refer students to Wikipedia for further reading, rather than trying to fit everything into the lectures. The PowerPoints I created are currently available online here, while Screencasts are available here. To be honest, I think there is a mass of room for improvement, but I was working to a very tight deadline – and I’m happy how well these materials and other changes to the class (including online formative and summative tests and SMS polling in class) were received by the students. In the module review feedback at the end of semester I received probably the highest praise and most positive response from any class I’ve taught… ever.
I may not have deposited any OER into any recognised repository, and I may have only made minimal use of the same, but in using open resources and in sharing what I’ve produced openly online, I made my life easier, improved the classes for my own students, and reached out to an audience well beyond my university campus. Not a bad result, all told.
