By Joe Pickett, OCW Publication Director
OCW has just released a new portal for its Educator project that provides two new ways to search OCW’s collection of course sites. We’ve made a short video that gives an overview of the Educator project, shows how to get to the portal, and explains how it works.
Search by Instructional Approach allows users to look for courses by pedagogic topic. The search results produce a list of courses that have Instructor Insights pages with in-depth reflections on the course’s pedagogy. OCW currently has some 90 courses with Instructor Insights, with more being published every month.
The search topics cover a range of concepts, from “Active Learning” and “Assessment” to “Instructional Design” and “Learning Communities” to “Teaching Problem Solving” and “Teaching with Technology.” In seconds you can discover how individual MIT faculty members have gone about teaching their courses and how their approaches to teaching have evolved.
Search by Teaching Materials opens OCW’s vast library of resources to targeted queries by content type. You open the search in a given subject (e.g. Chemistry), then identify a content type (Assignments, AV lectures, Lecture Notes, etc.), and then, in some cases, a specialty (Video, e.g.). So if you want to find exams or projects for Mechanical Engineering classes, the Finder instantly takes you to all of OCW’s courses with these features.
The OCW staff has long known that users can face frustration trying to find what they need in OCW’s vast library of teaching materials for 2,330 courses. The new Educator portal lets users know that OCW has been listening. After all, we’re users too!
top of every OCW page, you’ll see two new categories. These are the two search capabilities that we added to our Educator Portal earlier in the year: search by Instructional Approach and search by type of Teaching Materials. Why