Open Learning Network

Q: What are OER?

A: Open educational resources (OER) are digital materials that can be re-used for teaching, learning, research and more, made available for free through 'open' licenses. This can be different in different contexts, but it typically refers to a form of licensing which allow uses of the materials that would not be easily permitted under copyright alone.  This means that educational materials (such as texts, diagrams, teaching guides, video content, podcasts, CD-ROMs) may be copied, edited, remixed or re-used freely without payment to the original copyright holder being required.

In the spirit of openness and continuous improvement (and trying out available tools), we have set up a free account on Uservoice for suggestions on how to imporve this website.  Please have a look here: http://olnet.uservoice.com/

Cloudworks also has a Uservoice page set up for suggestion: http://cloudworks.uservoice.com/

Uservoice allows you to add ideas and also give weighted voting to your own and ideas added by others.

Wordle http://www.wordle.net is a tool for generating “word clouds” from text that the user provides. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. The user can choose different fonts, layouts, and colour schemes. The images that are created in Wordle can be printed out or posted on a website.

For more information on using and getting good results from Wordle see the attached briefing from Dr. Shailey Minocha (Department of Computing, The Open University, UK) - PDF

If you cannot remember your password to logon to this site there are two places that you can request a new password. One place is the logon block on the left menu that looks like this:

This fix is for situations where you try to connect to Elluminate using a provided session link and Elluminate loads and tries to connect but then you receive a connection failed message similar to the message below.

We are aware that on some of the PCs on campus there may be problems initially with connecting to the Elluminate sessions for the Open University 'Learning in an Open World' conference (22-23 June http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/2012)

  by  Pink Sherbet Photography 

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

The message is getting through and we are happy to see a lot of new members signing up to the site. However, we have had some problems with spamming and have had to put a system of manual approval in place for new registrations, so please bear with us if there is a delay in you being able to fully participate in the groups and posting comments on messages (particularly if you are signing up at the weekend).  Sorry for any disappointment and please don't let this put you off. If you have any postive suggestions for improvements, please add comments to this story.

Working with images in your blog posts or pages in the OLnet site has up until now been a little bit tricky. To make life a little easier a new module has been added to the site called IMCE. When you first start working with IMCE you might find it takes a little getting used to, but hopefully after using it for a while it will enhance your experience of creating content for the site. As well as hopefully making it easier to upload images, IMCE has facilities to make it easier to reuse images that you have already uploaded and create thumbnails.