If you’re a teacher, or someone who supports the learning of others in any way, there’s a fair chance that you search online for learning resources. Perhaps you look for just the right picture to illustrate your seminar presentation, maybe you search for an e-learning package to help your learners study a topic at their own pace, or perhaps you’d like to use the latest published paper to support a class discussion, well either way these are all examples of learning resources, and there are many more besides.
There are two ways of thinking about learning resources. How you think about them, and how everybody else thinks about them. Although this initially seems a banal statement, the different perspectives are important when it comes to sharing learning resources, especially when other people describe their resources so that you can find them. Considerable amounts of money have been spent on repositories to store content, and schemes for describing content meaningfully, consistently, and perhaps in a standard way, so that your system uses the same approach as mine. This is by and large a good thing, providing it helps you find the learning resources you are looking for.
But has anyone ever asked you how you go about searching online for learning resources? Do they know what attributes of a learning resource are important to you, how you decide what’s useful and what’s not, do they even know where you look for learning resources?
Well gentle reader, don’t say I’ve never asked you, because now there’s a simple survey online that asks how you search online for learning resources. I’ve tried to keep the questions straightforward, and reflect the activities, decisions and behaviours most of us can identify with. The survey is anonymous, so no names, no pack-drill. And Stephen has already completed the survey so you’ll be in good company. Just click the link below and answer a few simple questions. And please feel free to share the link with your colleagues because the more evidence we collect, the better our understanding will be about how all of us search online for learning resources.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/D3TPRVK
The survey is part of some funded work on an OER project I’m involved with. You can find out more about the rest of the project here.