Iowa OER’s September webinar was a show-and-tell for the Iowa Colleges and Universities Group in OER Commons. This Group was created earlier this year to facilitate sharing and curating OER that have been adopted or created by educators across the state of Iowa.
The speakers for this webinar were Denise Krefting, Instructional Designer for AEA Learning Online, which manages the Iowa AEAs Hub, and Abbey Elder, Open Access & Scholarly Communication Librarian for Iowa State University, who is an admin for the Iowa Colleges and Universities Group.
You can watch the recording or read the summary blog post below for additional information:
What is OER Commons?
OER Commons is a popular OER repository and referatory, which also contains built-in tools for content creation.
As a repository, it allows users to search its collections for OER that may be relevant to their needs, and also provides a robust system of tags and filters that can make searching more productive. These filters are especially important for OER Commons because it contains a wide range of content across disciplines and education levels, including K-12 resources.
As a referatory, OER Commons can “refer to” content on other platforms by linking to them and making them more discoverable for users. This makes OER Commons particularly useful for sharing content as well as finding it, since you can link content you’ve published in another tool within OER Commons.
OER Commons Hubs
“Hubs” on OER Commons are mini-websites of curated content and collections for communities who want a space to share their work.
As OER Commons describes them,
“A Hub is a customizable, branded resource center on OER Commons where a network of users can create and share collections, administer groups, and share news and events associated with a project or organization.”
About Hubs
We won’t be dwelling on Hubs today, though, since our webinar focused largely on the smaller communities within Hubs known as Groups, and particularly one managed by Iowa OER. The Iowa Colleges and Universities Group, the subject of this webinar, is housed within the Iowa AEA Learning Online OER Hub, which provides a space for sharing open content to support learning in K-12 for Area Education Agencies (AEAs) in the state of Iowa.
The Iowa AEAs have partnered with Iowa OER to help us host content aimed at a postsecondary audience.
What’s Included?
The Iowa College and Universities Group is used to share OER created or used in colleges across the state of Iowa. This means that it contains a more condensed and less complete set of resources than other OER repositories, but also that these resources have been vetted and used by instructors across the state. The base resources placed in the Group were added from the Google spreadsheet of OER Used in Iowa Colleges, which is open for any user to add their own content, based on the materials adopted at your institution.
The OER shared in the Iowa OER Group can be found in two places. First, on its Curated Collections, you can find content broken down by discipline, such as OER for Arts & Humanities or OER for Business and Communication courses. You can access the Curated Collections of OER within the main Iowa AEAs Hub page, by clicking on the Post Secondary OER tab under “OER Collections of Content.”
The Group’s main page also contains curated OER, but this content is organized into subfolders with more granular subcategories, such as Fine Arts or Statistics. Additionally, on the Group’s page you can find information about the group, a link to join, and more.
You can access the Group by searching for “Iowa” on OER Commons’ main Groups page, or by scrolling down the AEAs Hub to “Iowa Groups” and selecting “Iowa Post Secondary.”
Who can participate?
Anyone can use the group to find content. You can navigate to it right now to browse what’s available! This does not require an OER Commons account or membership to browse or share links with others. However, of you want to add OER to the Group that is in use at your institution, you will need to create an OER Commons account and request to join. The account creation process is covered in more depth in our webinar.
Once you are a member, you can add content to the Group. If the resource you want to share is not in OER Commons already, you can submit it to the repository and within a couple of days it should be ready to share. If the resource you want to add to the Group is already within OER Commons, simply go to it in OER Commons and select the Save -> My Groups -> Iowa Colleges and Universities option.
If this material belongs in a specific folder, you can select that folder from the dropdown menu under the Group. In contrast, to add an item to our disciplinary Collections, you simply need to add a tag specific to our Group. Information about adding content and tagging is available in the link placed in description for our Group, or you can navigate to the instructions directly at: http://bit.ly/iacommonscriteria
If you aren’t sure what discipline an item should fall under, you can add it to the Group directly and move it to a folder later, or another member of the group can handle that when they find the new resource you’ve submitted.
Roundup
Our webinar last month was an introduction to the Iowa Colleges and Universities Group in OER Commons, but more than that, it was a call for participation: even if you don’t want to join as a member, we want you to know about our Group, to use it to find resources, and to share it with others! If you are interested in what resources are being created as used across the state, check it out!
For more information about this resource and updates about other projects Iowa OER is supporting, join our listserv to discuss your thoughts with others across the state.