Rich open educational resources for personal and inquiry learning: Agile creation, sharing and reuse in educational social media platforms

Abstract

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are freely accessible, openly licensed multimedia documents or interactive tools that can be typically integrated in Learning Management Systems to support courses. With social media platforms becoming the central piece of the students' digital ecosystem, there is an emerging need to provide resources that can be integrated in various general-purpose open platforms. Courses are also deconstructed in smaller learning units for personal learning activities or in Massive Open Online Course sessions. As a consequence, rich self-contained educational resources embedding their pedagogical context and modality are required (these elements not being elicited anymore from the course itself). This paper presents Inquiry Learning Spaces (ILSs)-pedagogically structured learning environments that can contain labs, apps and resources-as rich OERs. Teachers can create ILSs for their students (as standalone resources or embedded in other platforms) and share them with other teachers who can adapt the ILS to their needs.