Suppose you’re designing an online course. How might you use Open Educational Resources (OER)? Let’s take a quick look at a common model for instructional design – the ADDIE model. (There are many others but this one is very common and useful for our discussion.)
A – Analysis: Identification and clarification of the instructional goals and objectives.
D – Design: Creation of a learning roadmap with objectives, assessments, exercises, content (text, media, software, etc.), and topical sequencing.
D – Development: Creation of assets to be used in instruction.
I – Implementation: Training instructors (how to teach the course) and setting up the course itself to be accessible by learners.
E – Evaluation: Determining how well the course achieves its objectives.
At which point do OERs enter the picture? At the development phase, of course! The design phase identifies what needs to be brought to the course and the development phase involves the creation of those assets. However, not all assets need to be created from scratch – why not find OERs that can be incorporated into the course? Now, there will most likely be a need to edit and customize the content to fit the identified design parameters, but even so, the time involved is (or should be) less than what it would take to create all of the content from scratch!
So, the next time you need to assemble a course, take a look online at what many universities around the world have made available with Creative Commons licensing at no cost! Of course, we’d like you to start with UCI’s own OER depository, but a couple of other sources of OER include MIT (http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm) and Merlot (https://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm).