0.4 Submitting materials to oer commons

The module“ My OER Portfolio ”showed how the OER Portfolio can maximize your experience using OER Commons. This module,“Submitting Materials to OER Commons,”explains how to submit your own content items or links to items about the field of open education to OER Commons.

Submitting your materials to oer commons

The module“ Tagging, Rating, and Reviewing ”showed how you can contribute to the community of OER Commons members by giving feedback to pre-existing OER. When you create new tags, or rate and review materials you have used, others benefit from the ideas you bring to the OER item. Your perspectives shed light into new ways of using the OER.

This module takes contribution to a new level of participation: by submitting your own educational materials. The type of materials you submit can vary—from a class syllabus, activities, or assessment to news articles, conference information, and wikis. What all these resource items have in common are that they support teaching and learning. In this module I’ll be showing a few examples to give you an idea of the wide range of materials available in OER Commons.

To get your materials into OER Commons, you’ll use a submission form. The names of the four OER Commons submission forms are listed below; these forms also identify the content categories you can submit to OER Commons:

• Submit your Course Materials (e.g., course-related educational materials)
• Submit Your Library or Collection (e.g., resources from digital media collections and libraries of digitized primary sources)
• Submit OER Matters (e.g., resources about the emerging field of open content and open educational resources)
• Recommend new OER materials (e.g., any OER providers and materials).

OER Matters is where the process of submitting materials begins for each of the four submission forms mentioned above. Each form follows a similar process. In this module, I will give a description for the first form“Submit your Course Materials.”For the other forms, I will describe what is different.

Why submit your materials?

If you have used materials in OER Commons, that is one part of the OER process; sharing back your own teaching and learning materials continues the cycle and enriches others’experience of finding useful materials.

Examples of materials submitted to oer commons

The following links are just a small sample of the type of materials you can find in OER Commons:

Introduction to Philosophy (example of a course material submission)

This course is an introduction to philosophy for university students meeting the first of their philosophy course requirements. The course is intended to introduce philosophical questions, to shed light on how some of history's greatest philosophers have approached those questions, to help learners articulate philosophical concerns of their own and, most importantly, to learn how to address them. Among the areas of philosophy explored include ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, and theory of knowledge.