Lesson 3.3 Reusing, Revising & Remixing OER
OER may be extremely useful to students and independent learners who want to revise content and acquire new knowledge, but it can be equally valuable to educators who want to embed such resources into their teaching. The most basic way of doing so would be by simply showing or circulating OER among students.
Beyond the possibility to read, watch, download and reuse individual resources for free, the beauty of OER is that anyone can also modify, remix and repurpose pre-existing resources as part of their own work, so you don’t have to build everything from scratch to reinvent the wheel!
The first step is to make sure that the resources you want to reuse can be modified and remixed (i.e. they are part of the Public Domain or released under an open licence), but then you also need to make sure that you properly attribute the resources – in accordance to the specific requirements of their licence – and also make sure they are compatible with the licence you want to use for your own remix.
Some OER portals incorporate tools that allow you to easily combine different resources into a single document. For instance, you can use the Open Author tool to remix resources on OER Commons. Open Author allows educators to remix resources (for example, lessons, activities, units) available on OER Commons and export the result in different formats for use in course management systems (CMS), websites, for printing, etc.
Video: How to Use Open Author on OER Commons
These are some important questions to be taken into consideration before remixing OER for your teaching:
- What subject(s) would you like to focus your remix on?
- What type of pedagogy (teaching methods and styles) would you like to use in this remix?
- What materials and resources would you need to teach this OER?
- What would your design for the remixed OER look like?
- How would you structure the OER?
- Where would you teach this OER?
- Who would the students be (grade, age, learning style, etc.)?
- How would the students learn/experience this OER?
- What would you rename your remixed OER design?
- How would your remix connect to the local community?
- Who would participate in your remixed OER (students, other educators, parents, community members, etc.)?
- How will this OER meet your students’ needs?
- How is this OER connected to your greater goals as an educator and your school/organisation/community goals?
Katz 2016