How To Make Your OER More Interactive
It’s Alive! Reviving OER with Interactive Content to Create a Living Online Course
This panel will feature educators who have enhanced existing OER by incorporating formative and summative assessment to remix/revise the existing resource into a package suitable for an online course. By using H5P interactive content, importing chapters from other texts, and/or adding a social annotation layer with Hypothesis, panelists have revived OER to become the basis for online learning and provided one quick, efficient model for transferring a previously in-person course to a blended or online learning environment. Our panelists will share their experiences with creating and incorporating multimedia, annotation, H5P activities and other interactive content in their openly licensed texts and will explore some of the challenges, successes, and surprises they’ve encountered along the way.
Learning Outcomes:
- Compare and assess interactive elements and multimedia that can be integrated into online content to enrich the student experience
- Attendees will understand how they could develop a simple openly licensed “Frankenbook” for quick pivot to online learning
- Imagine long term applications for interactive online course material such as making open textbooks with students as a form or non-disposable assignment
5 apps and 5 techniques to create engaging online classes
Presenters: Florencia Gabriele and Mariella Hansen
In Spring of 2020 we had to transition to online classes in one week. As we had to conduct our classes online, we had to find new ways to conduct sessions and exam reviews. We will share what works in small as well as large classes as well as on the institutional side.
The technology we will share is free, and easy to use. Participants will leave with tools that they can immediately adopt in their courses. The delivery of the course will be highly interactive and will model how we teach in our courses.
Learning Outcomes: Our goal is to share tools, and techniques that can immediately be applied by instructors to create comprehensive review sessions. We will show how to:
- Foster an effective review of concept understanding
- Provide engagement techniques
- Promote/rewards studying before the review session
- Encourage students to come to the review session better prepared and with questions
- Ease procrastination in studying
- Decrease anxiety
- Promote the correct use of jargon to define terms
Redefining the Textbook and Embedding Calculators for Online Exams
Presenter: Larry Green
With the OER model, we can now customize the textbook that we use by adding videos, interactive visualizations, and even games directly into the book. Using the LibreTexts platform, the presenter has taken the OpenStax Statistics textbook and embedded it with over 100 such activities to create materials that address all learning styles. Although, the presentation will demonstrate how this was done for the statistics class, this model can be used for any class.
We will also look at how such materials can be directly embedded into online exams using the iFrame. As many of us have had to move our courses to online, we struggle with how to create secure proctored exams where students still have the use of a calculator. One solution is to embed the calculator directly into the exam. The presenter will demonstrate how this is done using the Canvas LMS and LibreTexts calculator. This can be extended to other LMSs and other materials.
Learning Outcomes:
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Replace static textbooks with OER books that include multimedia, interactive visualizations, and learning games.
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Using iFrames to directly embed calculators and other OER information directly into exam questions so that students have access to the allowed exam materials while using an online proctoring system.
How distance learners create open online support communities on Twitter
As more education pivots online and many students experience distance learning for the first time, I will outline how distance learners use open platforms to build their own online learning communities and how effective these may be. All students should be able to fully participate in the exchange of knowledge regardless of location or stage of their studies. An open platform like Twitter which is simple to use and available at no extra cost to students can support this.
While open access online distance learning has seen steady growth, there remains evidence that open education distance learners have higher drop-out rates and many students feel isolated. OpenEd Distance learners often have other important roles alongside studying such as work or caring roles leading to a loss of student identity. Research shows Twitter can provide a platform for distance learners to develop this student identity in an open space benefiting students and HE institutions.
Benefits of Twitter for students: Research on how distance learners and full time campus based students use Twitter to interact with their peers show that the interaction is beneficial both to the students’ feelings of association with the course but also their understanding of the topics. Examples of this research and findings will be outlined.
Learning Outcomes: A literature review on studies showing how distance learners can use microblogging sites such as Twitter to create open support communities.
How (and Why) to Create Your Own OER Podcast
At MIT OpenCourseWare, we’re passionate about sharing OER with a global audience. Our newest initiative, the Chalk Radio Podcast, is our latest creative effort to promote awareness of OER at scale and to amplify diverse experiences of creating and sharing OER. We completed our first season with 100K+ downloads on podcast platforms and 110K+ listens on YouTube, so we strongly believe podcasting can be a powerful tool for sharing OER more broadly.
In this session, facilitated by the host of Chalk Radio and MIT OpenCourseWare’s Media Production lead, we share what we’ve learned as newcomers to the podcasting space, provide guidance to other educators initiating or currently working on their own OER-focused podcasts, and get feedback and tips from more experienced participants.
Our session hones in on the five stages of getting a podcast off the ground: 1) defining your focus and audience; 2) making technical decisions about how to record (and how to reimagine these possibilities when recording remotely during Covid-19); 3) preparing interview protocols; 4) post-production editing and accessibility considerations; and 5) outreach and promotion. Through an asynchronous special epsiode of Chalk Radio made especially for our session attendees, we’ll briefly share practical tips in each of these areas and then make ourselves available via zoom to work with participants to apply the suggestions to their own projects. We will use participants’ ideas and experiences to enhance the production and promotion of Chalk Radio, and invite participants to share their own stories of making, using, and sharing OER on our podcast.
Learning Outcomes:
1) Define your OER podcast audience and focus; 2) Get recommendations for recording remotely during Covid-19; 3) Discuss how to develop effective interview protocols; 4) Learn about post-production storytelling strategies; 5) Discuss how to make your podcast more accessible to a diverse audience; 6) Get feedback on outreach strategies and gain access to promotional email templates; 7) Amplify your OER story on Chalk Radio, the MIT OpenCourseWare podcast
