Publishing
There are a lot of ways to publish and share content. Where you decide to publish your work will depend on the type of content and the audience that you want to reach and how you want to licence it. Photographs, pieces of writing, videos, presentations, data and 3D models can all be shared in different places, with some platforms better suited to particular types of content. It’s important review the terms and conditions of any publishing platform you choose to make sure that you’re not transferring or losing the rights to your own work.
If you’ve decided that you want to share your content as an open educational resource (OER) think about which Creative Commons (CC) license you want to use. The Creative Commons website can help you through this decision-making process and give you more information about how to share your content.
If your work is in a Word document or PowerPoint presentation you might want to take advantage of the CC license plug-in for Microsoft Office. You can download this from the Microsoft website, however it’s is only available for PC users and isn’t yet compatible with Windows 10.
One thing to remember before you share your work anywhere is to make sure that you always keep a back-up copy of your original. It’s not unknown for web platforms to go out of business so always, always make sure you have an original safely filed.
Publishing to your own Website
Perhaps the easiest way to publish and share your content is to have your own website or blog. Blogging software like Blogger, WordPress and Weebly have become very popular publishing platforms. It’s easy to set-up a blog on WordPress.com or edublogs. Another option is Reclaim Hosting where for a relatively small annual fee you can register your own domain and run your own site.
Video
The most popular places to post video content are YouTube and Vimeo. From here it’s easy for anyone to share your content via social media channels and to reuse it through the use of embed codes and mash-up tools. Whilst YouTube is more popular, Vimeo has several advantages, the licencing is clearer and if you decide to update your video, the new version simply overwrites the old, which means that anyone who has embedded it will see the latest version. You can also allow people to download your video if you are happy to share it that way.
Photographs and images
For the photographers amongst you, Flickr is a good option to go with. You can select an all rights reserved or CC licence for your work, it also lets you set a default licence so that all your uploads are automatically licenced as you want them to be.
Presentations
Slideshare is to presentations what Flickr is for photographs. It too lets you set a default CC licence but you can set different licences for each individual presentation that you share. Slideshare is also good for sharing PDF files and it’s become a popular platform for sharing presentations and handouts from conferences. You can easily reuse content from Slideshare again by using an embed code and share to social media channels. Here’s an example from Jesse Stommel from University Mary Washington that has as an OER theme.
Curating content
A key role in teaching is being the guide on the side and signposting students to learning and this is where existing resources come into their own as we can point students to open textbooks, videos, data sets, 3D models and weave them into our own teaching narratives. In this role we’re essentially curating content, creating digital handouts and there are growing numbers of digital tools that allow us to do this in more visual ways. Here are a few examples which have free level accounts that you can try out.
Scoop.it allows you to curate content from the web add comments and then publish to a topic page. It also lets you autopost to Twitter, Facebook and other sites so learners can engage through their favourite channel.
Storify allows you to use to build learning stories that pull in content from multiple sources. It’s easy to embed YouTube videoes, Slideshare presentations, Flickr images, tweets from Twitter or Facebook posts you can embed any weblink. Once you’ve published your story you can easily update it and continue to build on it and share via social media channels. Take a look at Heather Bailie’s Storify on “Curation as a tool in teaching and learning”. Heather created this as a digital essay as a piece of course work and it demonstrates the versatility of these sorts of tools. Update – Storify has now been withdrawn as a tool, for an alternative take a look at Wakelet.
Another great way to re-use and publish content is to use a blogging tool like blogger or WordPress which we’re using here. Blogs are an easy way to create and publish content and it’s relatively easy to embed images, videos and other forms of re-usable content just like this Handwritten Tutorial on Nephron Function below, which was a simple cut and paste of the YouTube url.
Open Medical Education Practice 