I have unfortunately fallen behind on this course, due to other more pressing study priorities of the Ed Tech MA, a holiday and illness. However, I am determined to complete the course and have just completed week 3. There were many interesting resources tools and ideas.

Whilst, I was considering catching up, this has given me insight in to the usefulness of MCCO and being given the possibility to continue if there are problems with work, life and study balance. This does however, require self-efficacy and determination. I will consider general completion rates after I have completed the course.

Check your understanding for week 3

• You’re making great progress, keep learning!
• Well done on finishing Week 3 of Blended Learning Essentials: Getting Started.
• Questions below:
• Which of the following statements best describes Open Educational Resources?
• Virtual Learning Environments are also commonly called?
• Which of the following open tools would be most useful to help you produce an audio resource for your learners to access via the VLE?
• In the context of Open Educational Resources, what does ‘attribution’ mean?
• What type of tool is Socrative?

A short review of the week (well what should have been a week!) I looked at Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), digital tools, and Open Educational Resources (OERs). This helped me to understand the vast amount tools for planning and designing for blended learning for learners.

However, a comment that I made on the Blended Learning blog, was that some learners may not have the access to the ICT; not have the digital literacy required or the capacity to enable them to make full use of the resources, so this needs to be taken into account at all times (Beetham and Sharp 2013).

In the course for the week;

• There 7 videos, The week ahead, Introduction to VLE, Exploring open tools, Case studies on open Tools, Introduction to OERs, OERs case studies and a forward to week 4.
• Articles on the USING YOUR VLE FOR BLENDED LEARNING ARTICLE,
  FIND SOME OERS ARTICLE (see list below), plus a summary and Q&A for the week
• An exercises SELECTING OPEN TOOLS TO SUPPORT YOUR LEARNERS. (see below)
• End of week quiz.

Theses welinks are very helpful to begin my research into OERs repositories:

• Merlot – MERLOT is a curated collection of free and open online teaching, learning, and faculty development services contributed and used by an international education community.
• Open University’s OpenLearn – The Open University’s range of free educational courses and resources.
• MIT’s Open Courseware – Free online educational resources from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• XPERT – repository of e-learning resources created through the open source e-learning development tool called Xerte Online Toolkits
• Khan academy – 3600 videos from across many disciplines
• TES – shared teaching resources of all kinds, mainly for schools, but also for the VET sector.
• OER COMMONS – open educational resources for all sectors.

In all a great deal of resources to take away and and investigate. Well worth getting to the end of the week! Now on to week 4.

References

Beetham, H., & Sharpe, R., (2013) Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age: Designing for 21st Century Learning. Oxon. Routledge. Google Books

Future Learn (2019) Blended Learning Essentials. [Online] Available at Future Learn Accessed 8-4-19