Week 2 - Activity 8: An OER course

Evaluation Reflect upon whether the use of OER caused you to change what you wanted to teach, and what time saving (if any) would be gained by using OER.

Ariadne tended to come up with nothing. The one time it did find something, on the second search page, following the link resulted in "The system cannot find the path specified." Jorum gives thousands of hits, sometimes over 3,000. However for my week 4 and 5 searches I found a relevant PDF, which although was too advanced for my needs could be useful for a higher level class and/or school management. Merlot was useless, giving me nothing or irrelevant hits. MIT's results were all far too complex or not relevant. OpenLearn came up with something that looked useful for my week 3 search but the content was from 2007 and a link to an online scanner website did not work. A link to another document took me to something from 2004, too old to be of use (I read it and the content was dated, with reference to "AOL Online"). Rice Connexions was very slow to return a search list for every search done over 2 days and with 5 different search criteria. Searching on "Laptop Care Security" resulted in the first listed most relevant result of "Ten Easy Steps To Move Your Cheese For Better Aging", how could it possible come up with that given the search terms?

Overall, very disappointed given I selected a skills based topic related to laptop use and care, taking into account data backup and security. Admittedly the topics searched on related to school level age, but given the keywords used I expected more. What I tended to get was high-level academic theoretical papers and not down-to-earth practical advice, lesson plans or resources of any kinds (i.e. posters, slides, web tutorials, multimedia). In other words, these OER sites seem pretty useless to me as a source for school level ICT/Computing. I will stick with the current search resources I already have. No time was saved and the results have not made me change what I wanted to teach.

(Search result details can be viewed here: http://davidbrettell-h817.blogspot.com/2013/04/week-2-activity-8-notes.html)