Online and Distance Learning.com

Open educational resources (OER) are digitized materials that are available for use and re-use in teaching, learning, and research.

OER are extremely important for teachers looking for lesson plans resources or for assisting institutions to get online programs up and running easily and quickly - and within the small budget that they are often working with.

The benefits of Open Educational Resources courseware

The benefits of open educational resources courseware include:

• Low or no cost to users, as products are generally free to access and download;
• Shorter development cycle due to the collaborative, parallel efforts of developers;
• Adaptability to suit own conditions.

There are now many OER websites devoted to providing access for educationalists.  The challenge is to keep up with them all and to sort out the most useful for your own purpose.  A convenient way to search for open access material is to use search.creativecommons.org.  Note that this is not a search engine, but rather offers convenient access to search services provided by other independent organizations.

But there are other challenges in using OER in the development of educational courseware.

Open educational resources for students

An increasing number open educational resources are being made available to students and others in the form of open access books and open access journals.