Most likely you’ve relied on a textbook to be the backbone of your course, mixing in journal articles and online media for certain topics. Or maybe you have a less conventional mix of content. But what is an open-sourced curriculum?
Let me distinguish it from the term “open curriculum.” When a school adopts an open curriculum it means that students are not required to take any specific core classes, they simply need to meet a credit hour requirement and the requirements for their major. (There’s no classes like “University 101″ or “Composition 101″ all students must take.) When an instructor adopts an open-sourced curriculum for their course, it means all of the content they’re using is open/free-access and no-cost to their students. These pieces of content are called open educational resources, or OER. Faculty may compile links to share with their students through their LMS, or they may even make their own website that contains all of the materials necessary for the course. So where are they finding enough high-quality open-source content to teach entire courses?
While simply googling around for a video or news article may work to find one-off content, if you’re building a whole course from OER there are easier ways. There are a large variety of sites which specialize in open-source content, and 2-3 of them can probably provide everything you need for a given course. Start by checking out this excellent Edutopia post to help you navigate the entire process. But don’t stop there; there’s an unlimited variety of other excellent resources to check out, but I’ll give you 4 to begin with:
Now you may be facing the challenge of how to arrange the various pieces of content you find for your course and deliver them to your students. Will you post links in your LMS? Upload documents to a shared Google Drive? How about a creating a Ginkgotree Bundle that combines all of those resources into one digital content hub for you and your students?
Creating a course using OER on Ginkgotree is easy. You can either start from resources you already know and trust or use Ginkgotree’s Discovery Engine to uncover new materials to build your collection. Start by creating an account. From there, create a course and start adding the content you’d like using our media adder. You can choose to start without a textbook and skip straight to adding OER.
If you’re starting with materials you already have, you can input website URLs right into the Search / Fetch box or upload document, image, or audio files. You can import virtually any site or pull files from your computer or any of the most popular repositories like Dropbox, Gmail, Google Drive, Evernote, and more.
If, instead, you want to discover new materials to either add to an existing curriculum or build one from scratch, you can search for content by keyword. Your search will scour the hundreds of curated educational sites that Ginkgotree has found for open textbooks, webpages, and videos. (Want to recommend your favorite OER site? Tell me in the comments.) Simply choose to filter by “Show Free Only” to see the content available at no cost to your students.
So, have you taught with a fully open-sourced curriculum before? Do you already use open-sourced content alongside a traditional textbook? How are you leveraging OER, or how would you like to? (I’d love to read it in the comments!)
