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Existing Learning Materials

The purpose of this learning unit is to continue with the instructional design process by analyzing existing learning materials and assessment methods that can help achieve the identified learning objectives. For these purposes the unit focuses on sources of existing learning materials that can be reused, focusing on the needs of the trainings that are to be done within the Skills4EOSC project.

Learning Objectives

  • Collect existing learning materials
  • Compare learning materials repositories
  • Discover learning materials catalogues

Target Audience

  • attendees of the FAIR-by-Design ToT live webinar

Duration

60 mins

Prerequisites

Completed Stage 1: Prepare

Learning Tools

  • Training BBB room
  • Browser
  • Menti access or BBB quiz interaction

Continuing with the Instructional Design Process

Upon defining the learning objectives, the backward instructional design process focuses on thinking how assessment can be carried out in order to ascertain that the learning objectives have been reached and the new knowledge and skills have been obtained. This exercise helps the designer understand what type and content of learning material would be best suited to achieving the learning objectives.

Searching for readily available learning materials helps get inspired with the different ways of assessment and related learning materials. It boosts the process of instructional design that does not have to start from scratch but can reuse materials for achieving some of the identified learning objectives.

As licenses determine the possibility of reuse, upon discovery of existing learning resources license identification must be carried out to ensure that the resource can be reused with attribution under the specified rules. Closed learning resource that do not allow reuse can be used only for inspiration and limited quoting and citation for illustrative purposes.

Learning materials repositories

Unfortunately, at this stage there is no straightforward way to find readily available and reusable learning materials related to the topics of Open Science and EOSC. This is not due to the lack of such resources, as there has been a great number of projects and activities that offer training. However, there is no one catalogue of learning resources for instructors that has been accepted in the community as the place to go to when searching for existing learning resources. Most of the existing catalogue are focused on the learners, not the instructors. This has led to the situation where these materials are now mostly found in general repositories making it difficult to search and filter.

In this section we aim to provide a shortlist of links to repositories that should contain at least some learning materials on the topic of Open Science. Note however that this list is far from exhaustive and it does not include any discipline specific repositories.

OER Repositories

Identifying Open Educational Resources (OER) for reuse is always the best option as they are developed with reuse in mind. OER learning resources are stored in OER repositories.

There are many OER repositories available, however their potential for reusing learning materials for the purposes of designing Open Science related courses is still very limited due to a number of reasons:

  • most of the OER repositories are hosted by USA institutions
  • most of the OER repositories store learning resources that are not related to Open Science
  • there is no one search engine that searches through all available OER repositories

This is a short list of some of the most popular OER repositories and catalogues at the moment with a link to the repository and a short description:

  • DOAB (Directory of Open Access Books) - a discovery service for peer reviewed open access books and book publishers that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed books.
  • MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching) - a free and open online community of resources designed primarily for faculty, staff and students of higher education from around the world to share their learning materials and pedagogy. The MERLOT system provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers.
  • OASIS (Openly Available Sources Integrated Search) - a search tool that aims to make the discovery of open content easier
  • OER Commons - a public digital library of open educational resources. Explore, create, and collaborate with educators around the world to improve curriculum.
  • OERTX - a public digital library of open educational resources for higher education. Search collections or create and collaborate to improve instruction.
  • Community of Online Research Assignments (CORA) - Website with many assignments on many different topics including necessary materials to do each assignment
  • GALILEO Open Learning Materials - administrated by Affordable Learning Georgia, an initiative of GALILEO and the University System of Georgia which aims to reduce the cost of textbooks to students and contribute to their retention, progression, and graduation.
  • FORRT (Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training) - provides a pedagogical infrastructure & didactic resources designed to recognize and support the teaching and mentoring of open and reproducible science offering FAIR teaching and mentoring resources
  • and many others ...

Many EOSC projects have created their own learning platforms or even more general repositories with integrated catalogues where one can search for existing learning materials used for training within the projects:

Note that the EOSC Training catalogue that is part of the EOSC Marketplace is planned to become the focal point for the discovery of these types of learning resources. This catalogue is however still under development, and at the moment only a handful of resources are available.

General repositories and platforms

The general repositories and platforms host all types of resources including learning material. Lately they have become an increasingly favorite location for hosting instructor facing learning materials. However searching within should be done with greater care as the filtering options are general and it is difficult to search for a specific learning resource type.

A short illustrative list is:

  • Creative Commons Search - engine that helps find content that you can share, use and remix as it is provided under a CC license
  • Zenodo - a multi-disciplinary open repository maintained by CERN
  • OSF - a free, open platform to support your research and enable collaboration
  • and others ...

Learning Resources discovered within Skills4EOSC

Links provided in this subsection lead to the Skills4EOSC collaborative platform and may not work for external parties that are not project members.

The following list provides links to landscaping documents created by different tasks within the Skills4EOSC projects with the aim to discover and analyse already existing learning resources on different project relevant topics. While many of the links will overlap with the links provided in the above sections, these documents provide an excellent starting point for the discovery of existing learning resources journey:

Open multimedia

If you are planning to reuse multimedia in your learning materials (especially if using presentations) then the University Library Groningen offers an extensive list of open multimedia websites and services that should help you find multimedia with permissable licenses for reuse.

Another option is to use the images search in the Google engine together with the Tools -> Usage Rights -> Creative Commons Licenses.

Discovering learning content related to Open Science

It must be acknowledged that the Discovery step in the FAIR-by-Design methodology is one of the most complicated at this current stage due to the lack of clearly identified learning resources repositories and catalogues for learners and instructors materials. While this is expected to change with time, the initial landscaping already performed within Skills4EOSC is an excellent starting point.

For the purposes of understanding the diversity of the existing learning materials that can be found try to perform the following exercise that aims to discover different learning materials related to the topic of Open Science:

You have been tasked to develop a new course on the topic of Open Science for policy makers. You already went through step 1 of the backward instructional process and defined the essential information including learning objectives.

Spend some time thinking how can you assess if someone has managed to reach the defined learning objectives? This should help you identify the main concepts that you need to cover in your courses and develop content and activities around.

Now it is time to start searching through repositories and catalogues and find materials you could possibly reuse or be inspired with.

  1. Start from Zenodo with the "open science training" keywords

    • notice the type Lesson available in the filter on the left
    • the file type filter further allows you to choose different file formats
      • bear in mind that the zip file type is typically associated with content developed on GitHub and this usually means editable content in an open format (usually md); for details on this refer to the Produce section.
      • this is where you will find the currently very popular Opensciency learning materials.
    • using the keyword "course" usually provides you with mostly lesson type resources, but sometimes the type other is also used for learning resources

  2. Now try OSF search

    • the filter here is not as sophisticated as in Zenodo, so you will need to play with adding keywords such as "training" or "course"
    • look around and try to find something useful.
      • notice what information you would like to see to help you with your search
      • notice that some resources are available only to registered users
    • this is where you will find the Open Science Course example
      • take a look at the structure and the documents

  3. Lets try the OER repos/catalogues next

    • try searching for "open science" in OASIS, OER commons and MERLOT
    • notice that many results overlap across the different repos
    • can you find something more specific such as a lesson plan, syllabus, or assignment?
    • are you able to find a multimedia oriented materials such as a video, podcast, or similar?

  4. The next stop is FORTT and its Educational Nexus

  5. The final stop is the EOSC training catalogue

Now that you are armed and inspired with what you have managed to find, you are ready to proceed to the next stage Design.

Summary

The process of discovery of existing learning materials can not only help you reuse available high quality learning resources but also inspire you with different approaches to introducing the learning topic to the target audience.

There is however no one magical catalogue or search platform that can be used during discovery. To the contrary, finding existing learning materials is a journey across catalogues and repositories that can be a painstaking, complicated and long process. Thus, ensure that you have planned enough time for this activity.

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