The EdTech Maker Space: Using Service Learning to Crowdsource High-Quality OER

Finding OER is easy. Ensuring what you discover is high quality, relevant to your learners’ needs, and usable/reusable for different contexts is the hard part! Join our team as we showcase the efforts of hundreds of educators who participated in EdTech Maker Space (ETMS) service-learning projects to curate, adapt, and create nearly 5,000 free and open educational resources (OER) for adult education and literacy programs. We’ll share an evaluation tool developed in the process to make it easier for adult educators to evaluate and integrate high-quality and reusable OER activities for civics education, digital literacy, financial literacy, health literacy, and workforce preparation. We’ll also highlight what we’ve learned through these collaborative virtual laboratories, including which EdTech tools, strategies, and activity types have emerged as the most promising for creating and sharing high-quality OER.  

Our one-hour session highlights the following:

1️⃣ Recap of Recent ETMS Projects: Explore hundreds of free and open activities our volunteer Makers evaluated, curated, and/or created in our recent Maker Space projects. With a focus on quality and reusability, Makers identified, evaluated, adapted, and organized OER to fill gaps in subject areas where adult educators most need learning activities. See which EdTech tools Makers integrated and the resources they used to make it easier to create, remix, and use/reuse OER used in “Design Slams” to create original, reusable activities that leverage existing content.

2️⃣ Upcoming March/April ETMS Project: We hope our recap of recent projects inspires you to collaborate with us! If so, we invite you to stick around and learn how to participate as a Maker in our upcoming ETMS project that kicks off on Friday, March 17th. Building off our prior work, our next Maker Space focuses squarely on reusability! Your efforts as a volunteer on the project will help us narrow our focus on the EdTech tools and development strategies to make it easier to reuse and adapt OER.