Learn how MIT OpenCourseWare is helping educators find teaching resources through their recent OCW Educator innovation. Presenters demonstrate how to use OCW Educator, engage participants in guided practice, and facilitate small group discussions about how to improve this innovation for educators in online and blended environments.
MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a free and open publication of material from thousands of MIT courses, covering the entire MIT curriculum and used by millions of learners and educators around the world. OCW’s latest innovation is the development of OCW Educator, a collection of resources designed “pull back the curtain” on MIT teaching. It takes secondary and post-secondary teachers behind scenes with MIT faculty and shares creative commons licensed content and instructional approaches that teachers can re-use and remix in their own classrooms. The purpose of our presentation is to inspire teachers in blended and online learning environments to use OCW Educator to identify resources from MIT that can inspire and reinvigorate learning experiences for their students. We also hope to collect teachers’ insights about how to improve OCW Educator specifically for teachers facilitating online and blended learning experiences.
Session Outcomes
As a result of attending our session, participants will:
1) Learn about the latest MIT OpenCourseWare innovation designed especially for secondary and post-secondary teachers and become inspired to access and find teaching resources for their own online and blended learning environments.
2) Understand how to use the OCW Educator search tool to identify open and free teaching approaches and materials for use in their own classrooms.
4) Collaborate with others to identify ways to improve future iterations of OCW Educator for the benefit of secondary and post-secondary educators teaching in online and blended environments.
Presentation Format and Participant Engagement
In the first 10 minutes, we will orient participants to MIT OpenCourseWare, explain the purpose of OCW Educator, and briefly share how educators around the globe use our resources in their teaching. Next (in 10 minutes), we will share examples of OCW Educator teaching insights and materials (spotlighting examples from blended courses), and demonstrate how to find these resources using the OCW Educator search tool. Participants will then engage in 10 minutes of guided practice in using the OCW Educator search tool to identify resources for their own online and blended classrooms.
We will conclude with a 15-minute interactive discussion (leveraging the think-pair-share strategy in small groups) about how we might improve OCW Educator in future iterations so as to specifically benefit educators teaching in online and blended environments. Our focus will be on leveraging the expertise of the participants to develop solutions for common challenges and to identify new ways to move our work forward.
Materials to be Disseminated
- Presentation notes
- Sample OCW Educator instructional insights
- Sample OCW teaching materials
- Customized teaching resource lists