Week 3

We will use aspects of all of the learning theories in our presentation, but the main theory will be Cognitivism. We plan to use a hook at the beginning of the session, which will also act as a motivation element for our learners. Ideally, we would like to find a hook that showcases an Interactive Learning Material (ILM) found in an OER repository. ILMs are any type of learning object which engages students and assists them in better understanding course content through interactive means, i.e. games, practice exercise, simulations, etc. Once we have gained their attention through these ILMs and show the potential that they offer for motivating students, we will get into the meat of our presentation – identify, search, and evaluate OERs.

Then, we will employ additional elements of Cognitivism in our instruction, specifically by presenting information in an organized and sequenced manner. For each OER repository, we will talk about the defining elements of each repository, do some sample searches, and allow time for the learners to do searches for discipline-specific materials for their course, then reconvene to discuss our results.  

We will rely on our professors’ previous knowledge in this course. As the subject matter experts, they will be well suited to evaluate the quality of the OER materials that we find. We plan to help guide them through the searching process.  

This is an optional workshop, so we anticipate our participants will have a high level of intrinsic motivation. The participants are faculty members who are already using OER in their courses, or who would like to explore the possibility. We also plan to incorporate extrinsic motivations, too. Our hook will be an attention-getter and provide them with a goal – that they can find similar relevant ILMs and OERs for use in there courses.