An OER Course - Fairy Tales

[H817 MOOC Activity 8]

I drew up a short course format for a course about Fairy Tales.

Week 1 – Introduction to Fairy Tales

Common Themes in Fairy Tales from Different Cultures

Resources:

SurLaLune Fairy Tales (www.surlalunefairytales.com) (found via MERLOT). Covers a lot of what I want to cover – very useful site.

·      What is a Fairy Tale? Defining Fairy Tales. SurLaLune has a page on this.

·      Fairy tales through history – a timeline (also on SurLaLune). All useful resources.

Week 2 – Theme 1. Killing the Monster.

Resources:

·      Jack and the Beanstalk. Annoted text from SurLaLune. Good resource.

Week 3 – Theme 2. Transformation – from pauper to prince, from farmboy to warrior.

Resources:

·      Beauty and the Beast. Annotated text from SurLaLune.

·      Cinderella. Annotated text from SurLaLune.

Week 4 – Theme 3. Finding the treasure.

Resources:

·      Bluebeard. Annotated text from SurLaLune.

·      The Tinder-Box. Annotated text from SurLaLune.

Week 5 – the Fairy Tale in modern culture. Re-tellings in cinema and TV. Freudian views on the Fairy Tale.

Resources:

·      University of Notre Dame course, ‘Reinventing the Fairy Tale’.

·      Quite a good resource – the skeleton of a syllabus, some short bits of writing that explain what the teacher wants to teach – but insufficient as a ‘learning material’; some Q&As which would be helpful in class (although the OER is the questions only, so no way of being able to assess whether answered well or not)

General Comments - difficulties in using repositories

·      Wrong context. Not all resources were in English.

·      Wrong context. In general it was difficult to know whether the OER was suitable without opening it – very time-consuming.

·      Not relevant. It was difficult to know if the OER was relevant to what I wanted the learners to learn. Some OERs (particularly MIT’s) were very specific to a narrow learning outcome.

·      Not at the right level. I couldn’t tell if it was at the right level.

·      No way to judge the quality. For the most part, I had no way of judging the quality of the OER. MERLOT had a star review system, but most items were not scored.

·      No maintenance and upkeep – some resources were out-of-date. Quite often I would click through to an incomplete resource or an inappropriate resource – like a book I had to pay for.

·      Re-use / re-mixing – Jorum placed more emphasis on the ability to adapt and share resources than some of the other sites.

·      Overall, I found MERLOT yielded the most useful results.

·      I modified my course structure to adapt to some of the materials I found – it had to be a bit of an iterative process.