Open education resources (OER) have the potential to increase educator and student access to high-quality learning materials, no matter where they live or what school they are from, as well as help schools reduce costs as they transition to digital learning. The U.S. Department of Education has launched the #GoOpen campaign to encourage more districts, schools and educators to use openly licensed education resources. However, to truly maximize the potential of OER, students need to have opportunites to engage with those materials in ways that deepen their understanding of curriculum concepts and develop their critical thinking skills.
Featured Resource: YouTube
We believe in the tremendous value of OER and are committed to helping teachers and learners apply concept mapping seamlessly and effectively to free and openly licensed digital content in order to develop lasting, personalized knowledge. Concept mapping is a research-based practice for providing meanginful learning. Behind-the-scenes, our technology has been analyzing openly licensed content on various sites, such as YouTube and Simple Wikipedia. Hundreds of educational videos on YouTube have already been analyzed and are now available in Ideaphora's web-based knowledge mapping environment for learners to use while building their maps.
What does this mean?
- educationally appropriate videos are readily available in the resource library for learners use in building knowledge maps
- important concepts from the video have been identified and displayed as keywords for learners to easily drag-and-drop into their maps
- keywords used in maps link back to the exact point in the content from which they were derived, allowing for easy study
Try out the Ideaphora and YouTube integration by participating in our beta.
You can also download The Science Behind Ideaphora white paper here.
