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 include:
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.
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.
Volume 24, Issue 1, 2009 of Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning, on "Open Educational Resources" is now available on open access - courtesy of the Open University UK and Routledge.
Richard Baraniuk is a Rice University professor with a giant vision: to create a free, global online education system. In this presentation, he introduces Connexions, the open-access publishing system that's changing the landscape of education by providing free coursework and educational materials to everyone in the world. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA.)
This week's featured online school is:
This week's featured on-campus school is:
Recommended online schools for students living outside US and Canada:
With the growing interest in Open Access (OA) worldwide comes the increasing demand for training, knowledge development, and skills for the implementing of OA repositories and OA journals, the twin routes for making research results openly accessible. OASIS aims to provide an authoritative ‘sourcebook’ on Open Access, covering the concept, principles, advantages, approaches and means to achieving it.
You will find quite a lot of videos on this site. They are rather small, so you may want to click on the "full screen" icon (if they have one). When you want to return to "normal screen" just click on the "escape" key.
Please use the Online and Distance Learning Forums to ask a question, get more information, or make a comment.