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Reflections on #OER17 – From Beyond Content to Open Pedagogy
In 2012 I attended the Open Ed conference in Vancouver , provocatively titled Beyond Content. This was the same conference where Gardner Campbell captured our hearts with his infamous quote “this is not what I meant at all” , mirroring a sentiment that open was being co-opted by corporate interests and heading down a slippery slope of open-washing and dubious learner benefit. But what also struck me about this particular Open Ed conference was that the sessions weren’t really about Beyond Content in the way I had anticipated…the session archive shows that we were still very much talking about OERs, open courseware, and beginning to explore open textbooks. In other words, content was still how…
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Competencies and OER considerations
In December I was given an opportunity to work on a project that involves developing a checklist of instructor competencies for e-learning. This kind of project has the appearance of being simple, since checklists are purposefully simple after all. But delving into the world of instructors, competencies, and e-learning is an onion with many layers, and one that engages a bit of an internal struggle. The administrator-by-day part of me welcomes this project since it will have an immediate, tangible benefit to the people I work with and have a mandate to support. If done well, it will help with planning, managing, and evaluating some of our activities. It can…
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Box.net as a media repository
This post is basically a thinly-veiled, massive plug for Box.net. You can read all about what it’s supposed to do on their website, but I’ve been using it here at Canadian Polytechnic as a media repository for one of the programs I work with. Consider the problem (one not so unique): you work within a large unit that produces fantastic media for the institution on a daily basis. This media gets used by instructors and students via different channels–online courses using a CMS, websites, powerpoints, even paper manuals. The media is then dispersed through all these channels and sits in various locations–personal hard drives, servers, DVDs, CMS repositories. There…
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Why haven’t I tried this yet?
Found this review of Calameo buried in my bookmarks, and am wondering why I haven’t used it yet? Has anybody used Calameo as a tool for creating OERs? Or even as a type of online course manual?
