This course provides foundational learning and guidance for integration of digital skills and tools into adult education settings. It offers recommendations for instructors at varying levels of digital proficiency, with a primary focus on purposeful planning for integrating technology into a specific instructional context. Participants will design a personalized technology integration action plan in stages as they work through the course. The course also suggests tools and activities to support adult learners’ development in different domains of digital skills as identified in the Digital Skills Library.

Course hours: 5 hours

Course Hours: 2 hours

Course Description: This course introduces the wide variety of Open Educational Resources (OER), Creative
Commons, and other open licenses. Instructors at all levels of AE will gain an understanding of how to identify and
search for materials to use in their teaching practice. In addition to learning search strategies, instructors will gain
an understanding of how to evaluate OER for appropriate use. Those that will benefit the most from this course
are adult education instructors, trainers, and coordinators. By the end of the course, participants will be able to
understand and define OER and have a foundational understanding of how they can enrich their teaching, refine
search queries, apply appropriate filters, and determine licensing requirements for Open Educational Resources,
and explore, find, review, evaluate, and save materials on the educational repository, OER Commons. 

This course is designed as a template, or guide, to help teachers with experience in the Moodle Learning Management System environment to develop a comprehensive online lesson using OERs to deliver instruction. It is not a facilitated course. The course template  is designed with a basic structure aligned to a modified TEAL Lesson Plan Builder (using a WIPPEA lesson plan model: warm-up, introduction, presentation, practice, evaluation, and application) that allows teachers to create a usable online resource that learners can access anytime. The WIPPEA lesson planning model was chosen as the framework for this template because it is widely recognized and commonly used in effective lesson planning strategies for adult education (AE). The course template is designed to be flexible and will allow teachers to choose which WIPPEA lesson plan elements to develop online. The course template would be used to design a lesson that would fit a variety of instructional strategies (i.e., facilitated, self-study, or flipped) and would allow teachers the opportunity to integrate different types of OERs (e.g., text, audio, videos, assessments, and simulations).

Format

Self-directed; Estimated Completion Time: 3.5-5 hours