Producing OER (semi) automatically using convOERter (in the context of Higher Education)

Producing OER (semi) automatically using convOERter (in the context of Higher Education)

Friday 27/05 14:00-15:30h

Outdoor Area A

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Friday 27/05 16:00-17:30h

Main Hall

Abstract

Open Educational Resources (OER) are considered a crucial building block in the digitization of teaching and learning processes. They also play an important role in improving education around the world by providing free access to high-quality digital educational materials. The use of OER brings great advantages. When instructors distribute their materials as OER, other instructors will be able to use and adapt them. However, there are many challenges that still face the proper deployment of OER. One of these Challenges is the lack of technical tools that support producing or converting already existing materials to OER. In order to overcome this problem, we have started to develop a web-based tool that supports educators in converting their already produced and well-prepared educational materials with as much automation as possible into OER. In this workshop, we are going to introduce the tool and illustrates its functionalities. After that, the participants will be given the chance to discover the tool themselves and try to convert specific files to OER. Then, we will answer the participants’ questions and discuss to which extent the technical support can enhance the utilization of OER in (higher) education.

Needs Analysis

OER can be one of the most important methods to make education available to all and since the PhD students are normally very efficient Stakeholders in producing the educational materials, this workshop will be very beneficial for them. They will acquire the basic foundation about OER and will get in touch with the concept of openness in education and the importance of it. However, the most important stuff to be presented within workshop is the idea of the technical support in producing and converting the educational materials to OER. They will be given the chance to explore and use the tool (convOERter). We hope that our tool will be an added value to the OER Community and would provide an intuitive solution to produce more OER.

Learning Objectives

The workshop will cover the following subjects:

• General introduction to openness and the culture of sharing in higher education.
• Open Educational Resources (definition, motivation, goals)
• Licensing through Creative Commons licenses
• OER cycle (search, use, edit, create, redistribute)
• Practical sessions (finding OER, convOERter)

Pre-activities

I will send the participants OER handouts about finding, editing and distributing OER and a manual regarding the tool. All other skills and knowledge will be acquired during the workshop.

Session Description

It is intended to offer the workshop over 3 hours divided as follows:

• Theoretical Background: in this session the OER Foundation (definition, motivation and challenges) in addition to OER Cycle (creating, finding, editing and distributing OER) will be presented. This session is planned for about 60 min.
• Practical Session: In this session, the participants will be given the chance to practice what they have learnt during the first session by converting a file manually to OER. This session is planned for about 30 min.
• Break: The first practical session will be followed with a break for about 15 min.
• Technical Session: Here some technical tools will be presented with the focus on convOERter and its functionalities. This session will be presented in about 30 min.
• Practical session: within this practical session, the participants will be given the chance to use and test the web-based tool by converting a file to OER (semi-)automatically using convOERter. This session is planned for about 30 min.
• Survey: within the last session, the participants will be asked to fill out a survey and provide us with a feedback regarding the tool.

Post-activities

We will provide the participants with materials and needed knowledge in addition to some scientific papers to support them producing their educational materials as OER. We hope that convOERter would support the educators when converting their materials to OER and that more educators will be motivated to use the tool to produce OER.