Month: March 2020

Showcase post

Showcase post by Yun Chen March 27, 2020

Today, I will be writing a showcase post of EDCI 339 based on my reflection post 2 which was focusing on the Open Educational Resources (OER) and accessible online educational resources. Moreover, as we are working approach to the near end of the term, I believe that I have learnt a lot about distributed and open learning. Also, I hope this post will be well presenting my knowledge and understanding of the topic.

Speaking of Open Education Resources (OER), it defined as freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes. ( “Open Educational Resources“, n.d.) It means a general category that all the resources and materials that we could use for any educational level. For a better understanding and why it is important in the open learning world, here is a clip from TED that focusing on the topic of OER.

Many people may not be aware of, but open educational resources has given us many benefits on every perspectives. As in the article of ” The Importance Of Open Educational Resources” mentioned, being able to get useful and accessible online materials is getting more and more important these days.

First of all, cost is always the topic we have talked about. In the traditional ways of learning, textbooks and supplies are getting more expensive more ever before. As the article stated: ” rising at a rate higher than most other consumer goods” (“The Importance Of Open Educational Resources”, n.d.) As the chart is showing below (see fig.1):

textbook.cpi.png

(Fig. 1. The graph of comparison of consumer price index on different commodities between educational books and supplies, all items and apparel. Graph from The Importance Of Open Educational Resources. (n.d.). Retrieved March 27, 2020, from https://canvas.instructure.com/courses/815700/pages/the-importance-of-open-education-resources.)

Therefore, compared to the mostly free online accessible resources. The actual and physical textbooks lost their advantages. Open Educational Resources gives every student a chance to learn at a very low cost when the textbook is no longer necessary to the students.

Next, OER gives instructors the access to customize or even personalize the martial that they need. This make the class much more flexible than the traditional way. For example, a teacher only needs some parts of knowledge from the traditional textbook and the teacher also wants to add some particular content to let the students make a better understanding of the knowledge for this specific class. The flexibility of OER could be extremely help in his scenario where teacher could have the access to edit the material and make it more suitable for the students. Also, this is the benefit that old textbook does not have, that instructor will only get the strong related material to the class. Here is another video that showing that to relate the classes with OER:

Furthermore, OER has the opportunity to be better as long as it is editable online. The same martial can be edited by every student and teacher online around the world. This is not only useful in the educational area, but also in some other fields where the same work needs to be enhanced by different people working on the same object and sharing the same interest. That can

OER also has wide variety of materials that we can use. We used to need multiple textbooks or asking different teachers to understand the knowledge from class. By using OER we can get much more information from every angle about the same object. Sometimes, a user does not have to gather all the information, there is already someone generated all the knowledge for you there and waiting for you to explore. Now with OER we can get the knowledge from zero to success just through a click and search.

Once more, we need to bring up the evaluation guide of OER for reviewing the OER resources. we could use this guide while we are trying to evaluate the usefulness of the OER resources. Relevance, acurancy, production quality, accessibility, interactivity and licensing are the six measures of OER material. By using this guide, we will have the ability to identify the usefulness of an open resources in order to decide which material is useful for us.

OER also can be really useful in our professional areas when we are not in the educational world. OER is practical, because of the huge development of modern technology. We could be able to find solutions through OER for the real problems from our day-to-day life. There is always something we can learn from the from the online open knowledge.

References

Open educational resources. (2020, March 19). Retrieved March 27, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources

The Importance Of Open Educational Resources. (n.d.). Retrieved March 27, 2020, from https://canvas.instructure.com/courses/815700/pages/the-importance-of-open-education-resources.

Reflection Post 4

  • Identify three concepts, ideas, or issues you think are the most important and explain why.

First of all, I want to start off with a video from TED about why universal design matters. Michael will explain to us by expressing himself with sign language. That will also give us a general idea of today’s post:

a. I believe the most important concept of universal learning design is to give an introduction of your work. In the other words, the designers should know how and where to start designing the learning resources. I was impressed by Michael’s soundless and powerful speech. Therefore, I think we need to understand the  audience or the learners that we are targeting. Any design will be based on their needs and aim to help them for a better learning experience and reach the goals.

b. Preference editing tools from Floe will be helpful as well when the designer is trying to come up with a new content of learning.

There are a lot of resources available in the world of open education. Learner will be more likely to reach their learning goals when the resources are personalized. Learning should be the process of learners to dig their potentials and explore more opportunities along the way.

c. The role of Open Education Resources (OER) is an essential concept from any perspective. We have talked about OER earlier in the course. OER gives us a much wider and more convenient access to the knowledge. Whether educators or learners could take advantages of it. We could design “one-size-fit-all” learning content or personalized learning materials by using various Open Education Resources.

  • Identify two concepts, issues, or ideas you are having difficulty

understanding.

a. Speaking of the techniques of Floe’s Inclusive Learning Design Handbook. I have been wondering what kind of techniques could educators or designer implement to improve the learning experiences for learners. I understand some techniques were used to enhance the overall users experience and make it more accessible.  However, It did not give us some examples of it that made me a bit confused about this concept.

b. The other concept that I had difficulty to understand is Web Games and Simulations. I personally did not use this kind of approach of learning before and I am also curious how much progress can it make for the purpose of learning. Is interactive game really helpful for learners with a much more stronger visual impression.

  • Pose one question in relation to universal design that was not addressed in this module

During the process of universal design. Diversity is always one of the biggest concerns that we had. Every individual has their personal goals for learning, how to accommodate everyone’s needs and make appropriate approaches or methods of learning that can be acceptable for learners. In the module, it did not mention how or what approach that we could use or refer to. What exactly we can do to minimize the impact for a relatively more diverse learning group when we are making the progress on learning design?

Reference

Floe flexible learning for open education. (n.d.). Retrieved March 22, 2020, from https://floeproject.org/

Reflection post 3

The Most Memorable Online Learning Experience

In this reflection,  we were told to write the most memorable experience of online learning. This immediately  reminds me of another online course that I am taking this term which is called “Interactive Multimedia Learning” ( the official course website was attached). Before I decided to take that course I just barely had any learning experience from the online materials but as we are working approaching to the end of the term, what I learned from these online courses have really opened my eyes.

First of all, the very first challenge that I had in the course was we were asked to make a comics to tell a simple story. However, it was as difficult as rocket sciences to me, because I had absolutely zero experience on making animations and how can I even tell a story with it. When I was worrying about how to make the first step, some Online Educational Resources (OER) saved me. There is a software called ” Comic Life 3“(Official website was attached),  which is a software that can be installed on your PC to assist you for doing some comic works and that absolutely helped me to make the whole thing easier.

Here is a video clip of how to “Comic Life 3” to crate your own comic works:

After I had an OER such as a tutorial video to assist me to do the whole works, I wrote myself a script and I tried to tell the story by using some pictures and texts in the software. Finally, after some hours of drawing, texting and combining the pictures. I had my first comics done. That tells a story about how a college student should make a financial plan in order to save up some money and obtain the goals.

My final comic works has uploaded to the post:

Comics – Yun Chen

I have never learnt anything through this kind of method before and I was also surprised by what I accomplished when I was finishing the final version of the work. This strong feeling has pushed me to have a better understanding of our last week’s reading: “Understanding Technology In Education”. Internet is such a powerful tool that can make greater effect on education as a direct medium. Have a better understanding of the use of media and technology seemed very critical to all of us.

Furthermore, I have mastered the skill of screencasting and other things I did not have the chance to learn in the traditional class. By looking back to the most memorable online learning experience and what I have learned through this course so far, it is more like a phased summary to me. It reminds me how the theories I learned from this course to implement on the other learning obstacles.

References

A.w., Tony, & Bates. (2019, October 10). Chapter 7: Understanding technology in education. Retrieved March 6, 2020, from https://via.hypothes.is/https:/pressbooks.bccampus.ca/teachinginadigitalagev2/part/chapter-8-understanding-technology/