To summarise my thoughts about OER repositories, I’ve found them very inconsistent. While I’m sure that they all have a few gems hidden away, I experienced some kind of difficulty with all of them – broken links, irrelevant results returned, inability to preview content, packages which I couldn’t download or did not seem to work, bad quality materials, obscure labelling and so on. Some of this was undoubtedly my own lack of experience using the repositories and I guess I would be able to use them more effectively with practice – the problem is, if the initial experience with a resource bank is frustrating and wastes my time, it is unlikely I will return or spend the time learning how to use it more effectively. In my view, one problem is that they spread themselves too thin, trying to cover every discipline – if there was an OER repository specifically for my area of interest then I’d probably persevere with it. As it is, a well-targeted Google search still seems a better option.
I revisited YouTube and investigated whether using the ‘Filters’ on my search would enable me to find relevant resources quickly.
Searching for the term “digital identity” (following on from the activity I started in Week 3) I applied the filters ‘this year’ & ‘creative commons’ and this reduced the results to 18. Some of them were bafflingly irrelevant (e.g. building Windows 8 UIs??), but there was some good stuff in there as well, and some names I recognised from previous research I’d done. Interestingly, a TED talk about digital identity came up which didn’t appear when I used the same search term in the TED search box. So it looks like, for the moment, Google (YouTube) is the clear winner in all this…