Many of our recent posts have focused on how to find and curate resources available in OER repositories that have been created by other users and institutions. However, sometimes you already have the material you need -- either you’ve created born-digital or digital-ready content, or you have traditional content you want to turn into a blended resource. In either case, your content needs a host, particularly if you want that material to be shared with other potential users. This post will compare the options to create and host content from various repositories and suggest which sites are best suited to various types of material. While there are any number of ways to create and share your educational content online, we will tackle them a few at a time. This post will start by comparing three - Connexions, MERLOT, and Molecular Workbench.

The wealth of available educational resources can be overwhelming and difficult to navigate. Sites which currate these resources all have some built-in mechanism for sorting -- by subject matter, level of difficulty, source, etc. However, these pre-packaged collections are no replacement for currating your own prefered resources and materials into sets that correspond to your interests and courses. This series of posts will provide tutorials on how to create your own collections from sites which offer currated resource lists. Collections in HippoCampus are called "Playlists," which reflects the extremely multi-media focus of HippoCampus's materials. 

Creating a collection of resources on HippoCampus, as on most sites, requires you to create an account. Because HippoCampus is, in part, targeting individual learners, the sign-up process is quick and not very demanding. As soon as your account is saved, you’re ready to start creating a collection, which HippoCampus refers to as a “Playlist.” Once you create an account, you will find yourself as your own HippoCampus homepage. This page doesn’t look much different from the public homepage, though it does provide you with a link you can use to link directly to your account page from, for example, a course page. For our test playlist, we will make a playlist for an introductory level creative writing class.

The wealth of available educational resources can be overwhelming and difficult to navigate. Sites which currate these resources all have some built-in mechanism for sorting -- by subject matter, level of difficulty, source, etc. However, these pre-packaged collections are no replacement for currating your own prefered resources and materials into sets that correspond to your interests and courses. This series of posts will provide tutorials on how to create your own collections from sites which offer currated resource lists. While collections in MERLOT are formatted to work as a repository of related links, collections in Connexions are intended to cohere into something like a textbook – the modules are grouped together in a defined order, and can even be exported to PDFs that can be read through much like a traditional textbook would be. Much like an ebook, when viewed online the pages are arranged sequentially with a table of contents.

In order to create collections, you first need to register an account. The account is free and the information required to register is minimal, though you do need a valid email address since the account is useless until you activate it through their activation email and create a password. Once you create an account, you will find yourself at MyCNX Home, where one of the options listed under “Create and edit content” is “Create a new collection.”

Its latest foray into the education market, Google announced in July that it will begin to sell and rent digital textbooks through the Play store. The ebook market has been dominated by the likes of Amazon and Apple, with Amazon's Kindle-based textbooks maintining the lead in digital textbooks. While Google already features a few digital textbooks for purchase from smaller publishers, the new expansion is expected to create "a comprehensive catalog of higher education titles across science, mathematics, engineering, and more from all five major textbook publishers including Cengage, Wiley, Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Macmillan." Following on the heel's of Amazon's textbook rental model, Google will also allow users to rent textbooks for six months at discounted rates. The press release includes a list of some of the new top titles, including Complete Works by Plato, Constitutional Law, and Principles of Data Integration. Like other books available through the Play store, users will be able to access the textbooks across web and mobile platforms, as well as using the search, notes, highlight, and lookup functions.

3.

She and the tree be together

in the afternoon sun.  She is gently

fingering its bark; the tree is thinking only

about her.  How her hands are slow travelers

on its trunk.  Her hands are soft though

her feet are tough.  It is the first time for the tree

being climbed.  Can I hold her? wonders the tree.

Will my twigs tear? worries the tree.   Oh!

She is sitting now, in the understory. 

Here is a tree feeling human flesh resting,

neither perching, nor running, just resting. 

She is starting to imagine a story,

where the branch before her is the neck of a horse. 

Here is a tree that thinks itself a horse. 

2.

Here is a tree drowsing;

there she is, walking along the trail.

She is singular, thinks the tree,

a human, out in the heat, without a dog. 

Humans, like dogs and birds, are pests, the tree thinks

heat makes humans smell most foul.

She has walked too far into the mid-west sun,

too far away from the university. 

She lets out a sigh of relief

after laying her cheek against the trunk

its thick bark.  The tree is learning it can offer relief,

if not to itself, to another, and that is a sort of power.

She is not nesting or shitting; she is only

resting; she and the tree together.

1.

Here is a tree hoping

to be struck by lightening. 

It seeks relief from these dog days, 

when more water is rushing away than

is rushing toward it.  The river is leaving;

the tree can not. 

The tree is feeling invisible, to everything

Save the sun. 

Once a friend, the sun is now a foe. 

Isn’t dehydration, under the summer sun,

the worst way to die?

Here is a tree wanting

to flee from life, it was wanting to

flee from suffering, until she came into its life.