Finding OER in a Discipline-Specific Program
I find if very challenging to integrate OER into my courses because my discipline is so specific. In our program, we also need to use specific text books because they are on the book list for our board exam. This makes it very challenging to find external resources and use them in a course for students. Yet the concept of OER is too beneficial to overlook. I find myself searching for terms specific to a concept being taught, for example, “communication and healthcare”, and down the rabbit-hole we go. I also believe OER would be useful for finding content for learning activities geared towards encouraging critical thinking.
Example for “MIT Open Courseware – https://ocw.mit.edu/educator”:
https://nursing-midwifery.tcd.ie/assets/director-staff-edu-dev/pdf/Guide-for-Busy-Academics-No1-4-HEA.pdf
I found the content in MIT Open Courseware somewhat dated. For this reason, I’m not sure it would be my first stop when searching for resources. I did find an article/guideline that would be useful for teaching the concept of self-reflection to students in a healthcare program.
Examples for MERLOT – https://www.merlot.org/
This is a very useful video that can be used as a supplement to a textbook when teaching students dental anatomy.
This content was very easy to find! The link is discipline specific and leads to an online “course”, meaning it has content that I can definitely use as a resource in my course, however the site does not provide any type of interactive tools or learning activities for the reader. The content is still very useful as a resource for information on its own which will be a valuable resource in one of my courses.
Example for CORE – https://core.ac.uk
https://core.ac.uk/reader/82496111
This database holds many research papers and it was easy to find what I was looking for. I wondered if the same articles would be available through our library commons and tried the same search strategy. I found similar content but with less access to the full text. The CORE database is very easy to use, and the content can be used to encourage critical thinking in students.
TweetExample for "Finding OER in a Discipline-Specific Program":
n/a