By Kate Borthwick (Academic Coordinator e-learning)
HumBox is an online space for sharing humanities teaching
resources. It contains over 1300 resources from a range of humanities
disciplines and is an excellent place to showcase your teaching. HumBox is
managed by LLAS.
1.
Use your OER repository
as your personal website.
When you publish an open
educational resource in a repository (like HumBox), it receives a unique URL.
You can send your students directly to this URL to access the resource. This is
an easy way to put your material online.
2.
Avoid carrying paper/USBs
with you when you present at conferences.
You can publish your slides,
handouts, plus any related information in one HumBox collection – and then
simply give out the unique URL for this collection to your audience. This keeps
all of your files in one place and is always accessible (as long as you have an
internet connection).
3.
Refine and polish your
teaching material following review by colleagues.
If you publish a resource on
HumBox, any other registered user can post comments on it. HumBox users report
that these comments have been really useful in enabling them to improve their
work. After republishing their resource, they feel confident that others will
be able and willing to re-use it in their own context because it has been
reworked in a collaborative way.
4.
Find useful resources to
adapt or use if teaching a class at short notice.
OER sites provide a wealth of
material of all kinds: from whole courses to individual handouts and slides.
This can be useful if you have to teach a class in an area that is outside of
your expertise, or if you have to cover another class at short notice.
5.
Enhance your digital presence and international reputation.
OER sites, like HumBox, and the
resources held in them, are picked up easily by search engines, and so by
contributing to such sites you can shape an impressive professional digital
presence.
6.
See how other
practitioners approach particular topics and keep up with developments in your
discipline.
Browsing HumBox can give an
excellent overview of how other humanities lecturers across the UK teach
certain topics and ideas and keep you up-to-date with new approaches.
7.
Get good ideas for
enhancing your practice and reflect on what you do.
Browsing an OER repository like HumBox
can inspire new ideas and help you to reflect and enhance your teaching.
8.
Use OER early in your
career to glean ideas, and showcase work and teaching experience.
If you are an early career
researcher/lecturer, browsing HumBox can give some real-life examples of how
your subject is taught ‘in the wild.’ Publishing your own resources is also a
way of showcasing your work as soon as you start work.
9.
See perspectives from
other humanities disciplines.
Browsing HumBox enables you to
see how other humanities disciplines approach certain issues and ideas – this
may broaden your own perspective.
10.
Feel confident in adapting and re-using other people’s materials.
Most OERs have been created and
published explicitly for use and adaptation, and are licensed for such
activity. This means you can avoid concerns about using other people’s material
and worries about copyright - and you can use, re-use and republish (with
attribution) as freely as you wish to.
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