Presentation titled "Green Education Using Open Educational Resources (OER): Setting up a Green OER Repository". SPDECE 2012 Symposium, Alicante, Spain, 14/6/2012 (http://transducens.dlsi.ua.es/congress/spdece2012)

1. SPDECE-2012. Multidisciplinary symposium on the design and evaluation of
digital content for education
Green Education Using Open
Educational Resources (OER):
Setting up a Green OER Repository
V. Protonotarios, M. Ungur, H. Ebner, N. Manouselis
Alicante, Spain, 14/6/2012

2. About Open Educational
Resources
What are the OER?
OER = Open Educational Resources
Educational materials that are freely available and
licensed in a way that gives users the legal
permission to
 reuse – use the work “as-is” without having to ask
permission
 revise - alter or transform the work to meet the user’s
needs
 remix – combine the work with other works for an
enhanced effect
 redistribute – share the work or derivative work with
others.

3. Why use OER?
 Shared content becomes a vehicle for
collaboration and connection
 Shared materials are continually
improved upon through revisions
 Materials can be adapted and
localized to fit the specific audience
needs
 Saves time, cuts costs, and reduces
duplication of effort

4. Open Access Repository
Software
 OER combined with open access
repository software…

5. How to find OER?
OER is supported by an ever-growing active
movement
◦ Usually available through specialized learning
portals
We need to focus on OER in the area
of agriculture / green topics!

6. OER Commons
www.oercommons.org
 Provides access to a number of OER
on agriculture
 Provides a number of search options
and filtering of the results
 Green OER Commons
(www.oercommons.org/green) hosts
resources specifically on green topics

7. Organic.Edunet Web portal
www.organic-edunet.eu
 Provides access to almost 11,000
resources on Organic Agriculture &
Agroecology
 Features four different search
mechanisms and filtering of the results
 Not all resources are OER, so one
should be careful!

8. MERLOT www.merlot.org
 Provides access to a number of
resources on agriculture and green
topics
 Features classification of resources by
type as well
 Users may comment and review
resources

9. OER Africa – Agriculture OER
www.oerafrica.org/agricultureoer
 Provides access to a number of
resources on agricultural topics
 The number of resources is constantly
growing
 Resources are mostly relevant to
African agricultural sector

10. FAO Organic Agriculture portal
http://www.fao.org/organicag/en
 Provides access to publications, reports,
projects, glossary etc. on organic
agriculture topics
 The number of resources is relatively
high and growing
 Resources are classified according to
their top-level topic and are easy to find
 Suitable for vocational training

11. Edutopia: GoGreen database
http://www.edutopia.org/go-green
 launched by George Lucas
Educational Foundation
 Includes lesson plans, projects, web
sites
 Easily retrievable content through
search options

12. The issues faced
In most cases:
 Limited use of metadata = issues in
retrieving the resources
◦ Time consuming task
 Lack of collection policy
◦ Providing info on the attributes of the
collection / resources
 Lack of quality assurance / criteria
◦ Ensuring the quality of the provided

13. Our proposal: Green OER
collection
 a collection of OER focusing on green
topics
◦ a collection of metadata records which
describe quality educational material on
green topics
 covers green topics, such as
sustainability, agriculture, environment,
ecology, energy, biodiversity etc.
 Describes items like complete lessons
or lesson plans, guides and
handbooks, journal articles and
information sheets

14. Workflow

15. 1. Content retrieval
 Content experts browsing the web for
appropriate content
 Communication with content providers
in special cases
 Quality Assurance: Content has to
meet the Organic.Edunet Core Criteria

16. 2. Annotation
 Content/Metadata experts using
Confolio tool
 Annotation with Organic.Edunet IEEE
LOM AP, using all available info
 Support for multilingual versions of
metadata!

17. 3. Publication
1. Organic.Edunet Web portal:
http://www.organic-edunet.eu
Currently features almost 11,000
resources!

18. 3. Publication
2. Green OER-Commons micro-site:
www.oercommons.org/green
Currently features more than 2,000
resources!

19. To sum up
 There is an obvious need for quality
OER in green topics
 Metadata descriptions are usually
incomplete, making retrieval of
resources a hard task
 Quality assurance is not apparent
 We are working towards addressing
these two issues with the Green OER
collection!

20. Thank you for your attention!