To start creating collections on OER Commons, you first need to register an account. Commons has the quickest registration process I’ve encountered – it doesn’t require any institutional affiliation or specialty information. Just fill in name, email, and password and wait for your activation email. Once logged in, go straight to the “My OER” link, which is part of the sticky box at the top of the page.

The page which opens tells you, essentially, that you have no saved resources of any kind. The category names, currently all showing as zero are links which take you to the same categories as the sidebar: saved items, submitted items, evaluated items, authored items, and remixed items. You will also see the option to “Add Resource” on the same page.

For now, skip past these options to and scroll down to the bottom of the left-hand sidebar. The very last item on the list says “My Collections” and below it you will see the option to “create collection.” Select this option and the entry field will immediately change to ask you for a Collection title. For our trial purposes, we’ll create a collection called “U.S. History.”

Our previous Comparing OER Repositories post explored how to find basic economic video lectures. There was a clear best option: Khan Academy, whose focus on video lectures made it the easy winner. With this post, we are going to run a similar series of tests, looking for thorough and extensive libraries, finding resources at college level (not just K-12), making sure that resources are reviewed. To get a sense of what’s available and where to find it, we will write a series of posts combing through four different OER repositories – OER Commons, Khan Academy, Connexions, and FREE – looking for three very different sets of material and evaluate the results as well as ease of use.

1)      Interactive materials for chemistry students reviewing volume-related concepts
2)      Video lectures on introductory economic concepts
3)      English grammar and style exercises that faculty can use to evaluate and target students’ specific writing issues

strong feeling that this news needs to be entered into our course archive:
A Family Consents to a Medical Gift, 62 Years Later 

5/2:  Added link to Moodle for the Final Memorandum

ECON 136:  Working with Economic Data:  Valuing the Environment

I change my office hours each week (I try to post Friday afternoon), if none of those hours work for you, please email with all the times that might work for you.

4.

Here is a tree that is her horse away

from home; it carries her a way from her

home pain,this roaning out gelding, bay.  

Sitting at sixteen two hands; she is higher,

safer from ants and students alike.  She

is resting with her horse before the course.

She must be quiet and still for the tree

like a horse can sleep standing up, an old horse

can turn into one of the trees dotting the field.

She doesn’t stand on the second branch, it is sway

-backed, so she won’t pain the animal that way.

She is tender towards the tree, and he still yields

in a rustling of leaves and legs, he comes

to love; he wants to be her treehouse, horse, home.  

Many of our recent posts have focused on how to find and curate resources available in OER repositories that have been created by other users and institutions. However, sometimes you already have the material you need -- either you’ve created born-digital or digital-ready content, or you have traditional content you want to turn into a blended resource. In either case, your content needs a host, particularly if you want that material to be shared with other potential users. This post will compare the options to create and host content from various repositories and suggest which sites are best suited to various types of material. While there are any number of ways to create and share your educational content online, we will tackle them a few at a time. This post will start by comparing three - Connexions, MERLOT, and Molecular Workbench.