Dreamweaving Open Educational Practices

The Open University of Sri Lanka
Starting point
The first orientation workshop could be considered as the turning point of our
student teachers, since all activities started from this point. Teachers were
encouraged to search for and use OERs. At the workshop teachers were informed
about what are OERs, and different types of licenses with the symbols and the
purpose of these licenses.
Many teachers stated; “… we started to use OER after the first orientation…”
Teachers also said; “… we came to know about various websites such as OER
Commons, Learning space, Merlot, Curriki from where we could get OER …”
They had found many useful websites of OER repositories. Our
teachers had used search engines such as Google, Yahoo to search for OER, other
than the OER repositories provided to them through the Moodle LMS.
“At the very beginning we were able to get a good knowledge about how to search
for OERs and about the different ways they could be obtained.” one stated.
“We are very happy to mention that we experienced how to find the required
subject matter through OER during a very short time.” another one said.
This means that all student teachers were motivated to search and find the relevant
OER for their subjects after the first orientation workshop. Student teachers have
indicated many and different web sources of OER, what they have searched and
found, as evidence. Few examples are given in Table 3.1.1
Table 3.1.1: Weblinks of some OER found by student teachers
http://www.oercommons.org/courses/adjacent-angles/view
http://www.mathopenref.com/common/appletframe.html?applet=angleacute&wid=600&ht=300
https://www.oercommons.org/courses/graphing-linear-equations-2
https://www.merlot.org/merlot/assignments.htm?category=2513&isSerc=false&
http://www.oercommons.org/courses/sheppard-software-learning-games/view –
Adaptation/integration of OERs
Teachers at the Badulla Centre used many different modes to explain how and
why they integrated OER to the teaching-learning process, such as concept maps,
lesson notes and reflections. They agreed that the first workshop gave them a
good impression and understanding on what OER are and how they can use OER
in their day-to-day lessons. However, many of them were encouraged to integrate
OER during their PGDE teaching practice period. The photograph in Fig. 3.1.2 is one
35