Currently, I am teaching Science 9 and ELL Science in the VSB. Right away, the first thought I had after reading and learning about Open Education Resources (OER) is that it is really difficult to find quality resources that fit your needs, your style, and most importantly, your students for the courses you teach. For example, you may be teaching an unfamiliar course or a course that doesn’t have a large student demographic or a great number of teachers that create content and resources for the course (let alone share it on the internet). In the context of Science 9, there are so many resources available to both teachers and students that are free in the context of OER because it is a mandatory and popular subject. Something I have used recently is the PHET labs and teacher contributed worksheets. Often, I find myself adapting most material I find to meet the needs of my students. It can include removing or adding questions, extra steps or details, and almost always, organized and formatted to my liking. When I compare resources for Science 9 content to ELL Science content, it is night and day. Unfortunately, I have yet to come across free quality ELL Science material and resources that I can use to help guide and aid my course. I have found plenty of paid resources that I am currently using. Currently, the content I can see myself contributing as an open education resource would be to share course materials, compilation of useful resources and links. However, for some courses, like ELL Science, there still can be progression towards building a more comprehensive OER to benefit both teacher and learner.
https://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulation/legacy/balloons-and-static-electricity
Grace Landreville
January 24, 2021 — 12:28 pm
Hi Paul,
You bring up a very good point that there is a multitude of resources for core subjects but the amount of resources for elective subjects is more limited. Maybe there will be material contributed by you the next time I search for an unpopular course.
Thank you for sharing!
Paul Chong
January 25, 2021 — 2:37 pm
Hi Grace,
Yes I totally agree that there is way less content available for electives. Though, I don’t teach electives at the moment, so I haven’t had a chance to dive deep into potential OER’s relating to those courses.
You’re welcome!
Keith Webster
January 30, 2021 — 3:45 am
One of the key elements for successful OER is making it easy to adapt the resources. If they are digital documents or online systems that allow you to copy and edit, then even if they aren’t a complete match you can start working on the materials.
The hardest part of explaining open textbooks is that they don’t have to be adopted whole. It’s fairly simple to grab the chapter you need, edit the section that doesn’t work for you, and post it in your LMS. One of the most successful OERs in the sciences is Chem Wiki (now part of Libre Textts) which doesn’t organize itself as a textbook but as a series of pages that can be adopted specific groups and sequences to replicate many top textbooks (the publishers sued and lost).
https://chem.libretexts.org/
The original version of this textbook accounted for 25% of the internet traffic at UC Davis. There are now similar projects for several other science disciplines. In many cases each topic is treated at several levels of depth/difficulty so you can choose the one that works for you.