Using OERs, PERs, blending and flipping to deliver a computer systems module to Year 1 students.

Abstract

Computer Systems 1 is a common module for 1 st year students in the Department of Electronics and informatics in AIT on Level 7 courses. The core teaching material for this module comes from the ‘IT Essentials PC Hardware and Software’ course which is part of a suite of ICT modules that the Cisco Networking Academy (Cisco, 2016) offers. Thus, the material is proprietary in nature, hence the acronym PER (Proprietary Educational Resource). The courseware is delivered online in lessons via the Cisco VLE that the student must enrol on. This material is supported by OERs (Open Educational Resources) in the form of videos that are freely available online. Examples of these OERs come from the Professor Messer (Messer, 2016) and Eli The Computer Guy (Etherton, 2016) websites.