Open Educational Resources

From RSCWMWiki

Introduction

Open Educational Resources (OER) offer an alternative to paid-for or home-produced learning resources, this article introduces you to OER - what they are and where to find them.

Definition: "Open Educational Resources are teaching and learning materials that are freely available online for everyone to use, whether you are an instructor, student or self-learner." From OER Commons

Examples include full courses or modules, assignments, quizzes, presentations and ephemera like images or podcasts. No charges are made for their use, although there may restrictions on how they can be used, under some OER licenses. OER can be shared or exchanged with any tutor or learner in the world and usually adapted or amended, in much the same way as other "open" assets, such as Open Source software.

Searching for OER

There are a range of specialist search engines you can use to find OER, here are a few examples for you to try.

OER commons: open educational resources from around the world http://www.oercommons.org/

Jorum: for UK FE and HE resources http://www.jorum.ac.uk/

Temoa: OER portal http://www.temoa.info/

Slideshare: Share and search for Powerpoint presentations http://www.slideshare.net/

Wikieducator: A wiki-based online community promoting OER and collaboration in education. Join up and get involved.

OCW Consortium: A consortium of HE institutions creating a "broad and deep" collection of open educational content

More information

JISC OER Programme

HEFCE funded research by JISC aimed at researching models for using OER within organisations and embedding them in teaching and learning.

Open Learn: Creating open educational resources

The Open University are a leading proponent of OER in the UK, this free introductory course is a good starting point, to find out more.

Open Educational Resources Infokit from JISC Infonet.

This is a wiki-based resource and really is everything you wanted to know about OER and were afraid to ask! It's well organised, authoritiative and up-to-date:

https://openeducationalresources.pbworks.com/