This document discusses discovering open educational resources (OER) and different methods for finding them. It lists several types of materials people may be looking for and potential places to find OERs, including search engines, repositories, aggregators, social media sites, and asking other people directly. The document also outlines the UKOER approach of making resources easy to find by tagging them with metadata and placing them in repositories like JorumOpen under open licenses.

1. Discovering OER: What are we looking for? Lorna M. Campbell and R. John Robertson, CETIS, UKOER10, 23 July 2010 This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

2. What are you looking for? Materials on research methods Assessment Items Resources to support a specific topic (e.g. employability) A course on recursion in programming An image of crystal defects Something I can use in my textbook (i.e. commercially) Resources to support a particular learning outcome Resources at a particular educational level

3. Where might you find stuff? Google In a repository or other specific known system Through a feed Using an aggregator or search tool e.g. DiscoverEd, On iTunesU In JorumOpen YouTube, Flickr, Scribd, SlideShare

4. The UKOER approach Putting useful stuff where people can find it! How hard can that be...?

5. UKOER guidelines Put it in JorumOpen Put it somewhere else Tag it with ukoer Include other information like: Title, Author, Date, URL, File format and size Use an open license like Creative Commons

6. What did projects do?

7. Metadata for description

8. Dissemination formats

9. Most of the technical choices were a direct result of platform choice

10. Discovering OER: Phone a friend R. John Robertson and Lorna M. Campbell, CETIS, UKOER10, 23 July 2010

11. How do people actually find OERs?

12. A bit of... Google In a repository or other specific known system Through a feed Using an aggregator or search tool e.g. DiscoverEd, On iTunesU In JorumOpen YouTube, Flickr, Scribd, SlideShare

13. OR

14. Asheesh in phone booth by Naufragio http://www.flickr.com/photos/naufragio/541523566/ CC: BY SA

15. Ask someone: Down the corridor On Twitter On Facebook By email On an email list Through your blog

16. Advantages Personal Community building Expert knowledge Recommended resources Usually quick Easy to refine search

17. Drawbacks Scale Annoying? Ignored Personality driven Suggests other methods of discovery not effective or efficient Erratic ‘closed’ search

18. Do we know if we ‘put useful stuff where people can find it’? Not yet But we’re looking into it