Seek and ye shall find (or maybe not…..)

[AngelaSmith]

·         How easy was it to find a relevant resource?

Initially I wasn’t sure what I was searching for until I found the info on OERs and the face to face workshop on the Nottingham site where I then came across the online interactive OER resource. I found several resources via Youtube on OERs which were good but then became distracted watching them- but time not wasted.

 

·         How could you incorporate this resource into your professional practice?

 
I don’t normally utilize OERs  but could easily incorporate the OER workshop into an awareness raising session for tutors and possibly for learners who create materials collaboratively as part of their course requirements.
 

·         Which source did you find more useful (and why) – the ‘official’ resource bank or the open search?

 
Both were useful but for different reasons. The official resource gives clear definitions of OERs but is wordy and would need adapting to meet the precise requirements of the learners we work with. The interactivity was engaging and this would lend itself to our desire for collaborative working online whilst the youtube video could not really be adapted as a resource though the activities around these videos and presentations offer endless possibilities.
 

·         Are there any limitations to the use of your preferred resource for your learners (e.g. copyright licence; login requirements)?

 
Not that I could see though there may be compatibility issues if we tried to embed the link within our VLE .
 

·         Would your own students agree that the resource you prefer is accessible?

 
Probably not. We would need less text on slides, alternative formats and adaptability for accessibility.
Best wishes
Angela
 

[GrahamRGibbs]

Angela, re your point about embedding links within the VLE. I’ve had some experience with this and I think there are issues that the community needs to think about.

First, most of the resources are from YouTube and I use the embed code from YouTube to put them on the pages in our VLE (Blackboard). The problem with this is that not every academic will be able to do this. There is a Blackboard supported way of doing this but it’s not a neat as embedding and besides it requires that you find the resource from within Blackboard (even if you already have it in YouTube).

Second, I found this year that a lot of the embedding was failing, I think, because the Blackboard code had been upgraded so that the old embed code didn’t work. In one or two cases the video had also been withdrawn from YouTube. I had to do a lot of work fixing this.

This leads to the longer term issue of permanence. You can’t rely on links remaining for any time. Stuff gets moved and deleted all the time – as anyone who runs a website knows, links are always breaking. There has been little discussion in the literature about how do deal with this. Should we be downloading the resources to our VLE – not an easy thing with YouTube videos and in the case of some re-usable learning resources, impossible? If the resource has a CC licence this is at least legitimate. Over the years I’ve had experience of things disappearing before I had a chance to get a copy. Sometimes thing go for understandable copyright reasons. But there are other reasons too. For example, one of my YouTube videos was imperfect. A user wrote to me to say that there was not sound on it. Turned out it was only on one of the two stereo channels and they were listening to the one with no sound! So I recreated the video with proper sound in both channels and re-uploaded it. But there was not easy way to replace the original (and that was coming up high in the search results because of the number of views) so I kept both old an new versions (with a link for the old to the new). But at some point I’ll want to delete the old version and then any links to it will break.

[philtubman]

i wrote a blog post on the discoverability and sharability of resources that seems pertinent to this discussion:

http://sophistryblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/from-oer-to-cmooc-to-github-proposal.html 

[James Kerr]

Embedding resources, such as YouTube videos, into VLE and LMS is convenient, but only effective as long as the original source remains, and as long as the provider supports the types of linkages and embedding you use.  Granted, this example is about 2 years old, but we still regularly deal with the effects of this change from YouTube:

http://www.reelseo.com/youtube-iframe-html5/

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