Free Content for Educators

I was putting together the finishing touches to my new training notes on producing eLearning content today and came to the section on content repositories. If you have read this blog of recent then you will have seen that I am intending seizing the opportunity to push the use of our DSpace repository with a quick how-to guide. Working on the idea of a supplement to this, I set about compiling a list of similar repositories and teaching resources by way of showing the value of this very open approach to course materials; and not least to help strengthen my own view of, 'should we not start getting into the practice of assembling material instead keep creating'.

To demonstrate the value of adopting this more open approach, I decided to compile a list of free repositories and resources available on the Internet for teachers to use. I started by including those that I have known about for some time and often browse for myself such as Merlot, OpenSpace and Jorum, and then decided to trawl around for anything new, and as it had been a while since my last search, felt sure that I would turn something up. I was pleasantly surprised to very quickly stumble upon 12-dozen-places-to-self-educate-yourself-online. At first glance I thought it was 12, but no it was 12 dozen, though I confess to having not actually counted, but the list is very long. The collection of resource topics should prove to have something for just about everyone:-

Science and Health
Business and Money
History and World Culture
Law
Computer Science and Engineering
Mathematics
English and Communications
Foreign and Sign Languages
Multiple Subjects and Miscellaneous
Free Books and Reading Recommendations
Educational Mainstream Broadcast Media
Online Archives
Directories of Open Education

As I am sure you can imagine, the materials vary enormously from collections of MP3 podcasts and video’s to standard web pages. There was one particular site, and I did forget to tag it, that will allow you to convert the text into web content that you can copy and paste into your own site, interesting. If you have not come across this collection before, I would certainly recommend taking a look and tag.

Comments welcome, regards Barry