Module 3: Overview

Making Final Decisions

Module 3 Decide

Learning Objectives

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

  • Describe the purpose of OER Commons.
  • Identify the required components of the Design Guide used to develop a lesson for the Adult Learning Zone on OER Commons.
  • Remix and develop a lesson based on the Design Guide for a lesson in the Adult Learning Zone on OER Commons.

Topics

Key topics covered in this module include:

  • Iterative design and development process
  • Project design requirements for a lesson in the Adult Learning Zone on OER Commons
  • Developing your lesson prototype in Open Author

Context Summary

To this point in this course, we considered the characteristics and needs of adult basic education students and educators, the standards used to assess adult learning, the potential of using and adapting existing open educational resources (OER), and important components of designing instruction, such as articulating objectives, defining the scope and purpose, and using sound instructional principles. In addition, you have taken a deep dive into the discovery of your learners' needs, challenges, and opportunities. You put this knowledge into action by selecting a previously developed lesson to evaluate, and by creating a learning experience map that reflects your goals for the redesign of his lesson. In this module, you will conclude the course by completing the development of your redesigned lesson in Open Author, our lesson authoring platform, and by documenting your evaluation within OER Commons. We begin this process with an introduction to OER Commons and Open Author, and a review of the instructional design project requirements that will guide your redesign efforts.

Relevance to Practice

You will be evaluating, remixing, and developing your resource in Open Author according to the Design Guide created for this project. When we designed this course, our team contemplated a variety of authoring tools and online hosting platforms for the educational resources that will be designed and developed for this project. We had two important requirements:

  1. The online platform that would house our educational resources had to be reliable, sustainable, and efficient at indexing content.
  2. The authoring tool(s) to develop our educational resources had to be user-friendly to accommodate both novice and expert designers

OER Commons was an immediate top choice because it offered not only reliable and sustainable hosting capabilities for our content, but also Open Author, an easy to use online development tool. In addition, OER Commons, created in 2007 by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) (Links to an external site.) has long been a home for quality open educational resources, and our subject matter experts knew many adult educators would be familiar with the website.

Key Terms

  • OER Commons
  • Open Author
  • Achieve Rubrics

Module Design Credit