This post reviews an OER resource that is worth knowing about. Reviews will be a regular feature of this blog, so stay tuned for more recommendations (you can subscribe to the blog in the sidebar).
Open Washington is managed by our neighbors at the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges. The primary audience is faculty, but librarians, support staff, and administrators will find plenty of useful content here.
The “Learn OER” tab contains a self-paced course developed by Boyoung Chae (facilitated versions of the course are offered periodically). The training covers licensing and copyright issues in detail, which faculty planning to use OER will need to know. Chae’s instructional style is clear and readable – you can tackle one module at a time or get through the whole course in about half an hour.
The “Find OER” tab offers OER search recommendations broken out by format. Roll over the second-level tabs to search for courses, textbooks, videos, and images. Your search will be more productive if you have a specific goal in mind; you can browse for your entire discipline but you may do better searching for a course topic or even a keyword relating to a specific learning outcome.
The Open Attribution Builder is a unique and useful feature – wow! I built a sample attribution in the screenshot below.
Last, the “OER Stories” tab has medium-to-long video testimonials by faculty who have adopted OER. The production quality is good and these could be used as a springboard for discussion for units wanting to learn more about open pedagogy. One of the videos features Christie Fierro, keynote speaker for the OER Regional Conference on February 27, 2015, at PCC Sylvania.
