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RUNNING HEAD: Open Educational Resources (OER)

Open Educational Resources (OER)

By Prof. Jonathan Acua Solano
Monday, July 6, 2015
Twitter: @jonacuso
Post 179

During an ELT Masters Degree Program course at Universidad Latina (Costa

Rica) labeled as Learning & Teaching Resources around June-July 2015, Prof.
Fressy Aguilar asked participants, as part of the course goals, to design, develop,
and assemble a complete module for a virtual course on Moodle. The task does
not seem to be hard to achieve, but it does imply several steps that must be
pursued to ensure quality.
Though Prof. Aguilars course does not exactly account for instructional
design, some notions in this area are worthwhile having to get a quality product.
Among those notions, comprehending the scope in use of Open Educational
Resources is decisive and can help teaching staff to create more interactive and
attractive learning tasks for students in a virtual environment such a Moodle. As
soon as the assembly of the course module was over, the instructor presented us
with the following task to reflect on what we had just built for our Moodle modules
of the courses we had decided to virtualize.

Prof. Jonathan Acua Solano

RUNNING HEAD: Open Educational Resources (OER)

Prof. Aguilars Reflective Task

On Open Educational Resources
Open Educational Resources are any type of educational materials that are
in the public domain or introduced with an open license. The nature of
these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt
and re-share them.
In this context, " OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that

reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property
license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open
educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules,
textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or
techniques used to support access to knowledge .
As part of my assembly of a module for a hybrid course on reading skills on
Moodle, I actually created 3 weeks or modules for that course. And this is what
my instructional design plan is:

Prof. Jonathan Acua Solano

RUNNING HEAD: Open Educational Resources (OER)

However, as soon as all these pieces were put together is when, our instructor had
us reflect on the OERs that were used for the assembling of the three weeks I
produced. Here you have the OERs I utilized, the plan will tell you how they will
be used, and you also had here the reason why they were chosen.
Resource used in the platform

http://www.scribd.com

Why I did choose it

It is a free hosting for
documents that can be
embedded and,
consequently, displayed
within the Moodle or other
platforms or wikis.

Prof. Jonathan Acua Solano

RUNNING HEAD: Open Educational Resources (OER)

http://www.myquizcreator.com

http://www.blogger.com

http://www.youtube.com

http://www.glogster.com

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It is a website that allows
users to create quizzes that
can also be embedded and
displayed in Moodle or
other sites.
It is an extension part of
the Google family that
allows users to publish
content on the web for
free.
It is an extension of the
Google family that allows
users to spot tutorial that
can be easily embedded in
Moodle or wikis.
It is a site where users can
create interactive posters
that can be shown in class
or embedded in blogs,
Moodle, etc.

In brief, Prof. Aguilar had a very clear point in having us course participants
to reflect upon the choice of OERs. If a resource is going to be used, there must
be a good reason for doing so since it will contribute to the course success and
the fostering of deep learning among students. Web 2.0 tools can indeed help the
delivery of a course if used properly; the wrong and unscrupulous usage of OERs
can lead course participants to failure if not planned thoroughly bearing in mind
the plans objective to be accomplished.

Prof. Jonathan Acua Solano