OER for ESL and Other Learners

I have just opened a new site, oerinadulted.org. It is under construction as I gather resources to populate the site in coming months.

The ESL OER page has a few activities/resources that are currently being created by teachers in the "Teaching ESL to Adults" course, which I facilitate. I am adding new resources regularly as I locate good activities being coming from students. All activities posted are licenses under CC_BY_NC, so you are free to use and modify, except for commercial purposes, with attribution.

http://oerinadulted.org/ESL.htm

I am sharing this information with four CoPs that I believe might benefit from what teachers are creating: Reading and Writing, Diversity and Literacy, Adult English Language Learners, and Health Literacy (four of the latest activities deal with nutrition activities for multilevel classrooms).

There will be more to come. Once you review the activities, please comment on how you might use them or share them with others. Thanks. Leecy (leecy@reconnectioncompany.com)

Comments

Thank you Leecy. I still haven't explored OERs the way I want to so this will be a great resource for newbies like me.

di

I hope the community grows, Di. I plan to continually add to the resources and have made a few changes to the site this morning.

So here's a question to you and others who might post invitations for people to contribute to resources in your areas. Since the site is not a Wiki or a Blog, what's the best way to have people submit materials to be evaluate and posted? I fear getting a lot of spam if I post my email on the site. I'll have to find a solution to that. Any ideas are very welcome!

There is a MOOC currently being offered, called re the system, Industrial Design Service Course: Gain Experience for Good. It is offered by Designers for Learning (http://designersforlearning.org/aboutus) on Canvas, with over 1,500 participants worldwide. Students are creating OER for Adult Ed and posting their work on OER Commons for all to access. We are going to have more and more OER to be used in Adult Ed. Our challenge will be to sift through the content to make it readily identifiable to instructors and students. I love the trend.

The MOOC will be offered again in September. It is a facilitated experience that is proving to be very successful. The dates for that course are September 12 - December 5th, 2016. All course resources are offered with a totally open license, of course. The materials thoroughly cover OER with lots of instructions. It also has participants matching content to CCRS, giveing them a lot of information on that documents as well. Very exciting.

I would love to see all educators thoroughly familiarized with OER. I think it's starting to happen! Thanks much for your interest.

I was totally delighted when I read a blog post saying that we needed to get to the next level in OER... that it's great to have resources that can be reused and modified, but that at this point, there's very little actual modification happening, and we need policies and infrastructure to help that along. 

    Well, I was compelled to reply that there was this MOOC that was doing exactly that :)   

LEECY, this is a great site. The concept of OER is something that is very apropos, and I look forward to exploring it. It is possible now to provide a site like this that could act as a base for every ESL teacher in the country - and in the world!  

Concerning getting SPAM - perhaps you could arrange it like FACEBOOK GROUPS, which can be open to the pubic, but people must submit a request for membership and can be removed at any time by the administrators. 

Anyway, I will spend some time today to review it and give you some more feedback.

Thanks,

Paul

Thanks, Paul! The site is definitely a work in progress. It's a start! David suggested opening a gmail account just for the site, which I think will work, but any other ideas and suggestions are welcome! Leecy

Leecy, there is a great deal to discuss concerning OER, and I think that after the Webinar on the Mobile Revolution we will have more to discuss!

Basically, everything is trending toward Distance Learning via Mobile devices.

Eventually there will be many sites like yours connected together so that not only teachers but also students can access lessons anytime, anywhere. I have been putting all my lessons on Wix, Wiki spaces for teachers, and Facebook.

I also envision the eventual “alliance” between Formal adult education and Nonformal programs...everywhere. It has to be.

Libraries can lend out smart phones just as they can lend out books, CDs and DVDs.

The training of tutors will be easier.

Funding will be easier.

Now, someone is going to say that I am a dreamer.

But all I can say is – I’m not the only one!

Paul