OER in Course Design

Open Educational Resources are very useful in course design. There are several advantages of using OER in (language) course design & teaching that I can think of:

• Cost effectiveness: textbooks or practice books are expensive; most OER language courses use PDF files instead of textbooks to help students reduce the cost. By taking classes online, students also save commuting time and money.
• Motivation (Games, Dynamic Flashcard, Mobile Learning): Compared to traditional classroom lecture, online courses provide more choices in technology use and resources, especially in second language course. Student can also receive course information via Mobile (smart phone). Teachers often combine vocabulary games, dynamic flashcards and videos in the courses to enhance students' learning motivation. Another common tool is online synchronous meeting with instructors and tutor to assist students with pronunciation or grammatical problems.
• Self-Paced Learning & Diversity choices: In my previous study, students indicated that they liked to use online learning resources because of the self-paced learning feature. Students can learn in their own speed instead of waiting for others to complete the assignment before they can move to the next chapter. For language teachers, the variety of online learning resources provide rich selection of course materials, for instance, videos of Chinese culture and news from the Open University in UK. However, instructors should be careful about the credibility issue and choose appropriate topics for students in different classes.
• Instant Assessment for learning outcomes & Self-review (Quiz): Many OER language courses provide online quizzes and instant feedback. Students can have access to the quizzes and their results.

There are different websites that we can find OER for courses, e.g., OER Commons (http://www.oercommons.org/), MERLOT (http://taste.merlot.org/), Free Learning (http://freelearning.bccampus.ca/search-oer-sites/), etc. Finding OER websites is easy, but the next step, finding appropriate OER for the course and students is more challenging. This will be a task for instructional designer or instructor to identify and filter information before embedding OER in the course. It would be helpful to have a general search engine among the OER sites.