Open Educational Resources LibGuide

Do you often find yourself asking, “Can I include this image in my presentation? Do I have permission to share this video in my Blackboard shell?” Learn the basics of Open Educational Resources (OER) and how to access free, sharable images, audio files, course texts, recorded lectures and more using the newly created OER LibGuide. Created by Triton College Librarian Lauren Kosrow and Instructional Design Specialist Sara Gallagher, this online guide is an introduction to OER for faculty, students and staff who are interested in incorporating OER into teaching and learning.  And don’t forget that there are more LibGuides on many subjects available, and you can work with the library to create LibGuides specifically for your courses. For more information about LibGuides, contact Lauren Kosrow Ext. 3478 or laurenkosrow@triton.edu.

For more help with this tool and many others, stop by the CTE, send an email at cte@triton.edu or call extension 3371.

7 OER Sites Every Faculty Member Should Visit

In preparation for conferences and training sessions, I wanted to develop a list of my top 10 OER sites for faculty members to visit.  As it turns out, I don't have that many.  So, here's my top 7 OER sites that every faculty member should visit (in no specific order).

Open Professionals Education Network (OPEN)

In support of Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grant, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded OPEN and encourages grantees to reuse existing OER to save time and effort.  OPEN provides specific sources for grantee use for photo/images, video, audio/music, general education searches, such as repositories, open textbooks and complete courses, including the ones listed below. Select the “Find OER” tab at the top of the page for a list of OER.

College Open Textbooks

College Open Textbooks is dedicated to increasing awareness and adopting OER for community colleges and two-year colleges.  The College Open Textbooks Collaborative consists of twenty-non for-profit and non-profit organizations with over 200 colleges.  Furthermore, the organization provides training opportunities for instructors and peer reviews textbooks.  These efforts are focused on decreasing textbook costs by offering high-quality open source textbooks.

MERLOT II

MERLOT is a program of the California State University.  It contains thousands of learning materials, including textbooks, animations, assessment tools, presentations and much, much more!

MIT OpenCourseWare

In 1999, MIT Faculty developed and launched OpenCourseWare (OCW).  The pilot version ran in 2002 with 50 courses published.  A decade later, 2150 courses have been published with numerous translations available including Spanish and Portuguese.  Additionally, as of September 2013, MIT reported that OCW has tracked over 49 million YouTube views, 43 million iTunesU downloads and over 182 million visits to their website (MITOCW dashboard report). 

OER Commons

This site provides access to OER, as well as tools to organize, create and save.  Allows free registration and advanced search features including Education Level, Material Type and Media Format to name a few.

Open Course Library

The Open Course Library (OCL) was launched in 2011 by the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges in order to combat the effect of textbook costs on student success and completion.  OCL created new course material using Creative Commons licenses for 81 of its highest-enrolled courses.

Wikimedia Foundation

Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit organization that hosts numerous projects including Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia and Wiktionary, all of which are available under a Creative Commons License.  Commons has over 19 million media files including images, sound and videos that can be used at no charge. 

Please feel free to share any of your go-to resources.

On the search for videos

In my last two blogs, we discussed tools that we can use for creating your own videos.  This time I would like to share a few sources for videos and searching tips. The sources are primarily open educational resources (OER) that have licensing designed to make it simple for users to reuse, rework, remix and redistribute materials.  For more information, visit Creative Commons (CC) for a short video with information regarding their open licenses.

So, what are OER?  There are many definitions of OER.  In simple terms, OER are any type of resources (videos, images, tests, software, textbooks and much, much more!) that are in the public domain or licensed to permit free use and re-purposing by others.

Whew…finally, I’m onto the video sources I mentioned earlier. 

YouTube

The best way to find a video that is licensed under the Creative Commons license on YouTube is to use the CC Search tool described above in the General Search and Photo/Image Search sections. Unfortunately, YouTube does not provide a filter or advanced search capability on their home page for finding all YouTube Creative Commons licensed videos. However, http://www.youtube.com/creativecommons lets you see the most viewed and most reused Creative Commons licensed videos.

Tip:  If you are on the YouTube home page and type in your search term followed by a comma and then “creativecommons” the videos returned are CC licensed.  Also, when uploading videos, by default, the licensing is set at “Standard YouTube License”, which essentially means the creator is granting YouTube the right to broadcast the video.  See the Terms of Service (specifically, Section 6.C.) for full details.

Vimeo

Let’s you easily upload and find CC licensed videos.  This site tends to be used by businesses and organizations.

The Internet Archive has a collection of old video and movie footage.  Check out site for old cartoons, sports videos, ephermal films and news footage.

Tip:  This site allows you to download video and you burn them to a DVD or thumb drive to avoid slow internet connection (not that the internet is ever slow!).

TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. In 1984, it started out as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. The best talks and performances from TED and partners are made available to the world, for free. More videos are added on a regular basis.  All of the talks are subtitled in English, and many are subtitled in various languages. If you’re wondering, there’s an app too!

Do you have any go-to sites for videos?  Please share them with us.

Attribution:  “Video Search” in open4us.org, CC BY 4.0

More Video Tools

Last time, I shared a few ‘video’ tools that I have used.  However, there are many video tools out there.  You may also want to check out the following tools that others have used to create materials for their classrooms, as well as student productions.  Please let me know what you think of them and feel free to share more!

Explain Everything

This iOS, Android and Windows compatible app ($2.99) is an interactive white word and screencasting tool.  Check out these short videos, which highlight the commonly used features.  One example that I found, was that a student recorded how he was trying to balance a chemistry equation.  (Using the 'Explain Everything' App in the classroom YouTube video).  

PowToon

Create animated videos.  The basic features are free. They also have premium features for a cost.  Consider using it as an alternative to PowerPoint.

Vimeo

A video sharing site with multiple levels of membership and yes, there’s a free one too!  Vimeo is comparable to YouTube, but there are some differences.  Do you have a preference?  Let us know what you think.

Any Video Converter

This freeware converts videos to multiple formats and has editing features.  There is a Windows and Mac version. 

I invite you to share a tool and your creation with us (whether you think you're creative or not)!
  

Looking ahead…I’ll share a few tips and resources to search for videos created by others.

Video Tools

The CTE recently hosted a workshop on the Flipped Classroom.  We spent a day eating yummy food and snacks, as well as sharing instructional strategies and modeling a flipped classroom experience.  To supplement the workshop, I thought I’d share three video tools that can be used in a flipped or your current classroom.  I have used these tools in my online courses.  Essentially, screen capture refers to a process that records audio and video components on your computer screen.  (However, it may also refer to a still image of your computer screen.)

Screencast-O-Matic

This is a free web based screen capturing tool for up to 15 minutes of recording time or feel free to purchase for more features.  I use the free version.  Screencast-O-Matic allows video creation in multiple formats (mp4, avi and flv) for uploading to its site or YouTube.

Student Strategies:  

• Use Screencast-O-Matic to provide a video introduction of yourself or a course, whether it’s online, hybrid or face-to-face.
• Need to respond to a student question, but it would take too long to type it out or need to "show it", use this tool to personalize your response or keep it general and use it again later.
• Keep your first video short until you become more familiar with the tools and process.  
• Don’t sweat the small mistakes-the show must go on!

Most of you are already familiar with YouTube.  But…did you know that YouTube has editing capabilities and an automatic text captioning feature?  It’s not perfect-but it’s a start.  You may also upload a transcript.   Check out this YouTube video that quickly walks you through closed captioning.  Also, you can categorize your video files as public, private or unlisted. 

Tech Tip:  Use “Mashups” in Blackboard to easily view and share YouTube videos.

Here’s an example of how I used the videos tool to provide my students a tutorial for formatting Microsoft Word for a College 101 type course.

This is my first attempt at blogging.  I hope you found it helpful.  Is there something you’ve been wondering how to add to your classroom?  Need help with any of these tools?  The CTE is here to help you!  Send an email to cte@triton.edu or call extension 3371.