Reverse Instruction Tools And Techniques (Part 3) – Using Existing Web Based Educational Content

In the last two weeks, we've checked out ways to put content that you've already created online, and expanding on that content with screencasting tools, so you can give the ‘flipped classroom' a try. This week we consider the vast array of engaging educational media available on the Internet, which can provide an easy way to add fresh, fun content to your existing instructional materials.

Online Lectures & Educational Video Sites
I've published various posts on this subject, providing lots of great resources for free lectures and educational videos – a brief selection of these is provided below. Some of these sites allow their videos to be embedded into other web sites, so if you use a tool like an LMS or a Wiki to deliver content, you can considering incorporating video content there, otherwise access can be provided via links.

• The Khan Academy: With the backing of the Gates Foundation, Sal Khan's organization has become widely recognized as a premier source of free tutorials in dozens and dozens of subjects, over a wide range of grade levels.
• The OpenCourseWare Consortium: According to Makeuseof.com, “Simply put, the OpenCourseWare Consortium is the best place to begin looking for free online video lectures”.
• Academic Earth: This site provides hundreds of free video lectures from professors at leading universities such as Yale, Stanford, Harvard, and more.
• WatchKnow: Tens of thousands of educational videos for younger students (for K to 12, but more content is geared towards elementary and middle schools grades).
• TED: The hundreds of inspiring talks from this “Technology, Education, and Design” non profit organization are of an intellectual level best suited for High School or Higher Education students.

Open Education Resources
Another great way to find and use existing educational content is to search out and put to use the growing body of materials being made available as Open Education Resources (OER). OER are teaching and learning materials that you may use freely, and come with a defined reuse policy. Some of these resources can only be shared, while others can be edited in some way and then reused as a remixed work (learn more about OER here). It is worth noting that some of the video sites listed above are OERs.

Here's a few good resources for locating OER materials that you might wish to tap into to create flipped course content:

• OER Commons: The OER Commons is a structured database of links to high-quality resources found on other websites. “OER Commons provides a single point of access through which educators, students, and all learners can search, browse, evaluate, and discuss over 30,000 high-quality OER.”
• The DiscoverEd search engine from Creative Commons: A “search prototype developed by Creative Commons to explore metadata enhanced search, specifically for OER.”
• The OER Dynamic Search Engine page from Wikispaces: Wikispaces.com is a popular wiki site (many educators create their own wikis there – a great way to host your flipped course content). This page provides a consolidated search of hundreds of OER resource sites.

Educational Interactives & Simulations
There are so many cool interactive presentations and simulations available across the web, covering thousands of topics. These can provide yet another great way to add fun engaging content to an online learning resource. Open the search engine of your choosing, and search for “free astronomy education interactives and simulations”, for example. Conducting the same search with a different subject is likely to provide plenty of relevant resources to check out.

To illustrate further, here's the top four results for a Google search for “free astronomy education interactives and simulations”:

• UNL Astronomy Education
  Astronomy labs and teaching resources developed at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Includes simulations, flash animations, graphics, in-class questions and ranking tasks. …
• Educational Resources in Physics, Astronomy, and Related Fields
  Includes interactive pages on electricity, magnetism, energy, and fusion …
• 5 Sources for Free Astronomy Education Online
  Students who searched for 5 Sources for Free Astronomy Education Online found …
• Interactives
  These Interactives offer a fresh and dynamic method to teach the astronomy basics …

These three types of educational content sources can lead you to a wealth of free to use educational media that bring a new perspective and an element of interactivity to your online learning materials. As you can see, there are so many ways to get started with Reverse Instruction.

Do you have other favorite educational content sources that you'd like to share with us? Please comment and share!

Related Posts (if the above topic is of interest, you might want to check these out):
Reverse Instruction Tools And Techniques (Part 1)
Reverse Instruction Tools And Techniques (Part 2) – Screencasting
Reverse Instruction – A Tale Of Two Students and Active Skill Learning