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A simple way to curate web content. Better for collecting than for sharing.

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Opportunities to access  AUTHENTIC ideas

solution: undigested authentic materials

Opportunities to ENGAGE with each other

solution: discussion-based coursework

Opportunities to CREATE

reflection on learning

practice in expressing learning through teaching

solution: course projects where students curate modules of authentic materials

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Six attributes, one of which is "curator"

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A bookmarking too with clean design and numerous formatting options. You also have the ability to send as newsletter or embed in a website/LMS. Providing commentary on posts is limited.

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Why Curation Revolutionizes Education & Learning

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OERs:
Any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license. The nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt and re-share them. OERs [sic] range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi,
lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video and animation (UNESCO, 2013).

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eCampusOntario definition:

A producer and consumer of appropriate educational resources through sharing and development.

Marie Rutherford, Georgian College:

the careful, deliberate, thoughtful stewardship of information applicable to a topic or subject matter. The components of successful curation involve the timely collection and continual refinement of the information gathered.

What's missing from these definitions? Activities that foster student engagement with the curated materials and with the practice of curation

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This site offers more opportunities for adding commentary, but it is limited to a vertical listing of posts.

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Content Curation in an Educational Context

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Some materials for James Skidmore's webinar: Curating in the Open Ryerson University Open Education Week 5 March 2019

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Open education purists insist that only the most open Creative Commons licenses should be used - FOCUS ON TEACHING

curation brings in original, authentic materials - FOCUS ON LEARNING

even if curation doesn't produce OERs, curation generates engagement

in other words, curation is a useful addition to open educational practice

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Probably the best for gathering academic material. Useful for managing large academic reading lists which can be shared with and edited by others. I use it for providing bibliographies to grad students.

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Zotero | Your personal research assistant

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Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share research.

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Hypothes.is lets anyone annotate online content. An open source product with a bit of a learning curve, it allows for collaborative reading of curated content.
https://via.hypothes.is/https://blog.elink.io/how-to-use-content-curation-for-education-infographic/

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Comment on and highlight what interests you.

Annotate articles, websites, videos, documents, apps, and more - without clicking away or posting elsewhere. Hypothesis is easy to use and based on open web standards, so it works across the entire internet.

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Collaborate with anyone, anywhere. Use Hypothesis to annotate anything online with classmates, colleagues, or friends. Create a free personal account, or talk to our sales team about Education solutions. Get [...]

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Is it right to admire works created by artists we despise? In this lecture, I explore whether it's possible to separate art from the artists.

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This doesn't address precarious instructors directly (but influences the recognition of teaching among the professoriate, and that will trickle down to other levels)

Production incentives still needed for contract faculty

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Its advocates argue that curation is is more collaborative, engaging, and dialogic than mere learning.

curation is an open educational practice that leads to deeper learning

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Report commissioned by eCampusOntario containing:

overview of research into OER benefits and obstacles

identification of professional recognition as key motivator for OER/P participation by faculty

section on institutions with successful OER policies

proposals for moving forward on institutional policy-making

appendix with opinions and suggestions from OER practitioners

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A recent article in The Conversation based on the report.

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Some student organizations have endorsed the social media campaign #textbookbroke to draw attention to the burdens placed on students by the high cost of learning materials.

A solution to this problem exists: open educational resources. These are textbooks and other teaching materials produced by academics or instructors and distributed free of charge. Such resources could be a greater part of higher education. Why aren't they?

This was a question posed to me by eCampusOntario. This organization, funded by the provincial government, supports online and technology-enabled learning in publicly supported colleges and universities.

eCampusOntario commissioned me to produce a report on how institutions of higher learning could support the implementation of open educational resources. I worked with the centre for a year as an Open Education Fellow, one of six who were selected because of our own involvement in producing open educational resources at our colleges and universities.

Publishers' bottom line ahead of students?

My own university estimates that first-year students can expect to pay between $2,290 and $4,100 for books and supplies.

In some programs of study, students don't buy just textbooks anymore. Many publishers provide digital materials. If the instructor adopts the digital products too, students may be required to purchase a code to gain access to digitally locked material.

When books come with digital content, this may mean students can't share textbooks, buy a used copy, find comprehensive materials at the library or resell the book. In some cases, the publisher may also supply tests and quizzes, and students pay to submit work for grading.

(Shutterstock)

Many instructors and students say these publishing practices put the publishers' bottom line ahead of students' welfare.

Studies have shown that students will forego courses with high textbook costs or will make up the cost by spending less on food or reducing the number of trips home on weekends.

Students who have access to their textbooks from day one of term are likely to do better in their courses, and this results in fewer students dropping out. Recent research reviewing studies involving about 100,000 students and educators finds that there are no differences in effectiveness between open and commercial textbooks, and students' withdrawal rate in courses with open textbooks was significantly lower than in courses with commercial textbooks.

When teachers write the book

Educators who develop open resources decide that instead of relying on commercial books or resources, they'll create or write their own.

They make these free and accessible through Creative Commons licensing. The creator retains copyright while permitting others to copy, distribute and make some uses of the work. For example, users may be granted rights to reuse, revise, remix, retain (make, own and control copies) and redistribute materials. Some people create these resources on their own platforms; many others use Pressbooks, a WordPress solution that allows for online publishing in book-like format.

Some groups, like OpenStax or eCampusOntario, have created online libraries to house and even market these resources. Although the move to open educational resources is relatively young, such libraries of open textbooks now house standard and introductory courses in every discipline.

Thanks to the development of online software, it has become relatively straightforward for someone with expertise and dedication in a particular field to write or curate and develop high-quality materials. Pressbooks allows you to publish the material online and offers multiple formats for printing hard copies; eLink.io lets you package together resources; hypothes.is enables personal and crowd annotating.

Down with financial stress

The benefits of open educational resources go beyond helping students stock up on Kraft dinner. Developing or adapting open educational resources fosters collaboration among instructors, between instructors and students, and among academic services on campuses: libraries, teaching centres, bookstores, IT departments.

In our report, my co-author Myrto Provida and I argued that fostering open educational resources increases instructors' investment in their teaching and helps to raise their institution's reputation for offering student-centred education.

Some institutions - the University of British Columbia and Kwantlen Polytechnic University in B.C., Tidewater Community College in the United States, and TU Delft in the Netherlands - point to their involvement in open education with pride.

Still, it surprises me that these resources haven't taken higher education by storm. Some subjects do lend themselves better to open educational resources than others. I teach literature, so in my courses you can't get around having to buy the novel.

Offering incentives

In our study, we discovered that some colleges and universities across North America had provided incentives to encourage educators to create or adapt open educational resources. These were usually small grants and course releases that would give staff the time and resources needed to produce open textbooks.

But uptake of open educational resources is still relatively small. Even with incentives, many educators are reluctant to become involved. Faculty members who want to pursue the academic study and development of open resources are often discouraged not to. There's a long-standing bias in universities that this work isn't serious enough.

Modern universities are often not the disruptors they pretend to be, especially pertaining to career advancement. Faculty members won't engage with creating open resources because colleges and universities by and large don't make this part of the criteria on which they judge performance, promotion and tenure.

Mention in tenure policies

We only found two institutions in Canada, the University of British Columbia and the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, where explicit mention of open education had been made in performance and tenure policies.

We recommended that Ontario's colleges and universities recognize creating open resources in policies governing tenure and promotion. Doing so would change the culture of these institutions and be a more effective incentive than course buy-outs or small grants. It would communicate clearly that institutions of higher education take seriously the responsibility to tailor knowledge to students and to reduce barriers.

Producing quality educational materials takes time and resources. But if doing so is an integral part of people's job descriptions, they will do it, and do it well.

[ Like what you've read? Want more? Sign up for The Conversation's daily newsletter. ]

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Textbooks could be free if universities rewarded professors for writing them

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Some student organizations have endorsed the social media campaign #textbookbroke to draw attention to the burdens placed on students by the high cost of learning materials. A solution to this problem exists: open educational resources. These are textbooks and other teaching materials produced by academics or instructors and distributed free of charge.

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An environmental scan of the local OER environment can anchor a workshop for beginning institutional policy development. This tool gathers data for the scan.

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Open Educational Practices (OEP): broader than but including OER, OEP captures pedagogical
activities and approaches that foster a shared, collaborative approach to teaching and
learning that is informed by the same spirit as found in OER.

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Curation steps in an educational context

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Curation steps in an educational context

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Collect

gather up whatever artefacts you come across on topics you teach

Filter

select those artefacts that would be useful in a particular course or learning situation

Annotate

formulate commentary and questions on the artefacts

Arrange

put the artefacts together in a meaningful fashion (e.g. a learning pathway)

Publish

make the artefacts available

Circulate

spread the word through media available to you about the curated collection you've published

in a course setting, this means getting the curated collection out to students and engaging them on it through

discussion

annotation

using it as a model of practice for them to curate their own collections in a similar manner