Designing a Course on Digital Skills using OER

 I made a quick and dirty design for an online course “digital skills” that runs for 5 weeks. The course design looks like this:

I explored the different open education resources. Some quick reflections on exploring the 5 open education resources is as follows:

 

-       Merlot  – has content for pre-K to professional levels. More than 20 material types in 9 disciplines. Has option to create material with content builder.

-       MIT OpenCourseWare – has content for undergraduate and graduate level mostly with few non-credit courses. Materials on 16 main topics.

-       OpenLearn Create – has content from beginner to advanced levels. More than 23 subjects. Has option to create courses.

-       OpenStax – Content organized in 6 main categories of Arts, Business, Humanities, Mathematics & Statistics, Science & technology, Social sciences. There are tens of thousands of learning objectsorganized into pages. These are arranged into thousands of textbook-style books. Generally more suited for advanced levels of learning such as undergraduate and above.

-       Saylor – has content in 19 disciplines from basic to advanced levels (graduate and above).

 

After quickly going through the above resources I found the following 6 OER related to ‘digital skills’ (note: there could be more out there. This is based on my quick and limited search)

 

1.     ICT skills facilitator guide

2.     Being Digital: Skills for Life Online

3.     Digital Literacy Fundamentals

4.     ICT and Digital Resources: Post Secondary Resources

5.     Digital literacy: succeeding in a digital world Introduction

6.     Digital skills, digital learning

After careful consideration, I would recommend the “Digital skills, digital learning” course by OpenLearn Create as being the most relevant and appropriate. I donot need to reinvent the wheel and the course largely meets the requirements.

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