Curating Content
Key Points:
Creating new video content is time-consuming and effort-intensive. Avoid doing so, to the extent possible.
Explanatory videos, text and animations, exist for most topics in standard curricula. Curate and adopt content from Open Educational Resources.
State how the curated content fits into one's course plan, to ensure that students do go through it.
Create activities for students to assimilate and apply the content.
Why curate?
It is tempting to declare that 'Nobody teaches this topic the way I do' and jump into creating one's own videos. However, creating videos involves planning, rehearsing, recording, editing, rendering and uploading. So it takes much more time and effort than preparing for the corresponding face-to-face class.
Doing a lengthy live lecture using an online meeting platform, recording the meeting, and making it available to students, is not effective. There are issues of student attention span, unstable network connections, asymmetric bandwidth, download size of large videos and so on. Hence it is advisable to look for existing content on the topic.
A lot of content to be delivered can be found online in form of videos, PDFs, websites, simulations etc. It is advisable to start by finding and using online content that fits one's topic and objectives. This process is called content curation.
Watch the video "Digital Curation in Education" from 1:42 mins to 2:40 mins - Click Here.
This video itself is an example of content curation, since it was not created by the course team.
How to curate?
Look for repositories of Open Educational Resources (OER). Some of these are: NPTEL, SpokenTutorials, OERCommons, FreeVideoLectures. The content in MOOC platforms such as edX, Coursera, FutureLearn, and video hosting sites such as YouTube, may be used provided the content author has released the content under a Creative Commons license. Even for copyright material, it may be possible to get permission from the content owner for using it a course, under Academic Fair Use.
How to utilize curated content?
Decide which part of the curated content is pertinent. It is unlikely that any external resource will fit as is into one's course.
Identify portions of the curated content that students should go through and specify them clearly.
State how the curated content fits into one's course plan, to ensure that students do go through it.
Create activities for student's to assimilate and apply the curated content. These could be LbDs or LxIs.
Do a live (real-time) online class to clarify doubts, provide additional explanation, contextualize it for one's students, and so on.
How much to curate?
Some of you may be wondering whether it is ok to cover a large part of the course using curated resources.
First, curation is a deliberate and thoughtful process which involves selecting, organizing and presenting content that has already been created. Curation is not merely giving links to certain content. While curating content for an online course, an instructor may need to customize it accordingly for her students. For example, she can include additional explanations, what students should focus on and design learning activities related to the curated content.
Second, the percentage of material that can be curated depends on the availability of OER resources, an individual instructor's decision on the suitability of using these resources and the institute's policy.
To delve deeper, here is a question for discussion: In your opinion, what portions of a course can be curated and what portions must be recorded by the instructor?
Please post your opinion in the Discussion Forum. Your responses may help to frame a policy on this point!
Meta-point
In a course for students, the 'Question to discuss' sections such as the above can be converted into LxI (Learner Experience Interaction). LxI are a powerful way of bringing rich discussions into the course and enabling peer-learning.
You can create an LxI by providing: (i) a focus question for discussion, and (ii) incentive for students to post their answers and respond to others' answers. This point is elaborated later in creating LxIs.
Technology Tools
Online curation and Bookmarking
Pintrest: Online platform designed save and discover information (specifically "ideas") using images and, on a smaller scale, GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboards. One can even pin web resources to their board and furthere classify them into catagories. [Link] [How to's]
Raindrop.io: This is an online bookmarking application that has a excellent UI and UX which also allows tagging and classification of web resources. This is a crossplatform application designed to ease search and classification of information. [Link] [How to's]
Save to Pocket: Pocket is a comprehensive tool for managing your bookmarks, no matter which device you’re on. It offers a perfect bookmarking tool that covers major web browser extensions, mobile apps, web based interface and much more. Pocket’s web capture tools are available for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. [Link] [How to's]
Evernote: Is a note taking application that comes its own web clipper tools which allow you to easily capture bookmarkswithout any hurdle. You can capture the links in the form of bookmarks, HTML files, and even save entire articles offline as PDFs. [How to's]
Browser Bookmarks: One can always use the bookmarks available with browsers and have folders to classify them. Some browsers like chrome allow synncronisation of bookmarks accross devices when you login with your google account.
Offline curation and Collection
Microsoft One Note: This is note taking application available on most platforms and allows collection of anytype of web and digital resources like files, images, videos etc. It provides options like notebooks and dividers for classification and tagging for searching information. [Link] [How To's]
Evernote: An app designed for note taking, organizing, task management, and archiving. The app allows users to create notes, which can be text, drawings, photographs, or saved web content. Notes are stored in notebooks and can be tagged, annotated, edited, searched, given attachments, and exported. This is also a crossplatform application. [Link] [How to's]
More information
Here are some more resources for delving deeper into the concept of curation in online instruction:
Finding OER resources - https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018/01/10/finding-oer-remains-challenging-solutions-abound
Digital curation is one of the ways of finding and keep a repository of content that seem useful and usable. For example, see - https://sites.google.com/site/technologytoolboxforeducators/pedagogies/curating
You may refer this article from Beeboom to explore more web resource curation tools.
Contribute
Some of you may be aware of content repositories other than the ones mentioned on this page. There may be ones specific to your area. Please post such information in the Discussion Forum. We will periodically collect your inputs and make them available to all.