Inspire Blog Author: pietrowr

OSU Open Textbook Network Workshop (Key Takeaways)

Recently, I attended an open textbook network workshop, hosted by Oregon State University and sponsored by Open Oregon Educational Resources and OSU’s Affordable Learning Initiative. If you are an instructor or a faculty administrator who cares about the impact of textbook costs on our students and want to learn what you can do about it, I would highly recommend to continue reading. Key Takeaways The Concept of Open Textbooks: Open textbooks are textbooks that are free and can be used either in whole or in part at no cost. They are often written by experts, scholars, and professors in their respective fields and are edited and published in the same matter as commercial textbooks. Open textbooks are licensed with an … OSU Open Textbook Network Workshop (Key Takeaways)
by · May 25, 2018

Student Personas (An Introduction)

What is a Student Persona? A student persona is a summary of a specific type of student. This persona represents archetypes NOT stereotypes of a broader student segment or group. A student persona summarizes who the student users are and why they are using the learning system, as well as what behaviors, assumptions, and expectations determine their view of the learning system. Why Create Student Personas? There are many reasons why instructors and instructional designers and developers create and use student personas, such as: To represent the major needs of the key student user groups. To provide a reliable and accurate representation of your targeted student audience. To enable you to focus on a manageable and memorable group of students. … Student Personas (An Introduction)
by · March 16, 2018

Create Interactives with H5P (Five Simple Steps)

H5P (HTML5 Package) is a free online tool that allows you to create and upload, download, and share HTML5 interactive content using H5P.org or by installing a H5P plugin on Drupal, Moodle, or WordPress. 5 Steps to use H5P.org
  Go to https://h5p.org Click on “Create free account” [located in top right corner] and create a free H5P user account. Login to your H5P account with your username and password. Navigate to the “Examples & downloads” page and choose one of the H5P Content Types. Use the “clone content” feature to create a new piece of H5P content from one of the examples. Give the cloned content a title and adapt the cloned content to suit your needs. Choose from the … Create Interactives with H5P (Five Simple Steps)
by · December 29, 2017

OER Attributions: Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

So you’ve located your open materials, Now what? Providing attributions for open educational resources (OERs) is not only required for Creative Commons (CC) licensed materials, but citing sources for collected works is a good practice to follow in general. Documenting the material that you are using by including the author’s name and the name of the license, as well as where you found it can be especially helpful… When embedded content is malfunctioning or fails to appear. You can refer and go to the URL of the content item. When learning what permissions are granted for the content. You can refer to the license name, which informs you what you can do with the material as well what is permissible. … OER Attributions: Giving Credit Where Credit is Due
by · February 10, 2017

On the Hunt for OER (Open Educational Resources)

Who doesn’t like free stuff? But in the field of education finding free materials that fulfill your needs often proves difficult. In this blog post, I have annotated a short list of websites that provide free resources that can be used by anyone (instructional designer, teacher or student) and for any purpose from a personal or professional website to a multimedia presentation to an online course or assignment. Pixabay What is great about Pixabay is that not only can you use these images, but you can modify them to suit your needs and even use them for commercial purposes without having to pay any fees. Nearly all are free of copyrights, which means attribution is NOT required…so no need to worry about citing sources … On the Hunt for OER (Open Educational Resources)
by · December 23, 2016