Open educational resources，o.e.r are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or creative common area and are freely available to anyone over the Web. They are an important element of an infrastructure for learning and range from podcasts to digital libraries to textbooks and games. There are more resources about open source multimedia and open content curricula.
Open Educational Resources infoKit has the thorough collection on OER information,including OER basics, myths, glossary, management, quality, cultural consideration, barriers, enablers, accessibility, and legal issues; it's supported by the Higher Education Academy / JISC Open Educational Resources program.
For a quick picture of OER resources, please read Index of OER Resources; A Review of Open Education in 2011. For a curation about "view, access, use, share, re-distribute, or modify educational materials for free" by Andreas Link: Scoop.it of OER.
The U.S. Departments of Education and Defense launched “Learning Registry,” an open source technical system designed to facilitate the exchange of data behind the scenes, and an open community of resource creators, publishers, curators, and consumers who are collaborating to broadly share resources, as well as information about how those resources are used by educators in diverse learning environments across the Web. It catalogs digital educational resources from a range of federal agencies and organizations, such as NASA, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Smithsonian, as well as other willing contributors from the academic, nonprofit, and commercial sectors. Some of the next steps for the Learning Registry are:
- Publishers will share information about their education content in the registry.
- Application developers will design tools for displaying and reporting on usage and social metadata.
- Recommendation and search engines will leverage Learning Registry data for surfacing relevant learning resources.
- LMS vendors, content aggregators, portals, and other platforms will create links to the Learning Registry to share data about content used within their environments: How it’s been used and how widely used it is, and so on.
Achieve and the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) released a new tool for users to rate the quality of open education resources (OER). The tool will allow educators to rate the quality of these resources, enable educators to align content to the Common Core Standards directly within OER Commons. Now educators can use curated lesson plans, courses, and learning modules with readily available information about how these materials meet the highest standards for learning. To help states, districts, teachers, and other users determine the quality of the resources, Achieve created a series of evaluation rubrics. These rubrics are available online at www.achieve.org/oer-rubrics, or you can Download the Rubrics. OER Commons is now hosting the tool and its resulting evaluation data on (www.oercommons.org). Educators and school administrators from across the country at the state and district level have been trained to use the Achieve OER Evaluation Tool, and have provided an initial pool of rating metadata.
The role of open educational resources in personal learning environments
OER useful resources - list of links to Open educational resources，o.e.r initiatives, resources and tools was compiled following the first IIEP discussion forum on Open Educational Resources.Links have been placed in the following categories to give users some guidance on the types of OER initiatives and resources that are available to them:
.Portals and gateways
.Repositories
.Development and publishing initiatives
.Software and tools
.Teaching using OER
.Communities
.Writing on OER
OER Commons (Open educational resources，o.e.r) - find free-to-Use Teaching and Learning Content from around the World. Grade K-20, stronger in higher ed; all subjects; all media types. It offers opportunities for systemic change in teaching and learning through accessible content, and importantly, through embedding participatory processes. With contents coming from trusted individuals and organizations, it is supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, ISKME, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education. ISKME's OER Commons Teacher Training Initiative offers teachers a collaborative professional development model centered on engagement with Open Educational Resources (OER). (watch this video for more info.)
The OpenCourseWareConsortium is a worldwide community of hundreds of universities and associated organizations committed to advancing OpenCourseWare and its impact on global education. An OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a free and open digital publication of high quality university‐level educational materials.
Open Training Platform - UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Science and culture organization) facilitates a collaborative access to existing free training courses and promotes open licensed resources to specialized groups and local communities for development.
The UNESCO Open Educational Resources (OER) Platform is a new, innovative online Platform that will offer selected UNESCO publications as fully-licensed OERs. UNESCO OER Community is now the OER Community on the WSIS KC (knowledge communities platform).
Creative Commons provides free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry; with CC search which offers convenient access to search services provided by other independent organizations for you to find licensed works that you can reuse, remix, and share.
For the past four years, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has been the leading grantmaker in the field of “open educational resources” — high-quality digitized educational materials offered freely and openly for anyone with access to the Internet. These materials are available for use as is, or for re-use as appropriate.
MERLOT - Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching, is a free and open online community of resources designed primarily for faculty, staff and students of higher education from around the world to share their learning materials and pedagogy. It's peer reviewed and catalogued by registered members and a set of faculty development support services.
MERLOT MAN is a networked partnerships between African and US educational institutions affiliated with the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) and leading Global eLearning Providers with development programs targeting Sub-Saharan Africa.
OER Africa is to establish dynamic networks of African OER practitioners by connecting like-minded educators – teachers, academics, and trainers –to develop, share, and adapt OER to meet the education needs of African societies. There are resources including Understanding OER(publications available), finding OER and OER in action.
OpenLearn is the UK Open University's contribution to the Open Educational Resources (OER) project. It is part-funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
LORO (Language Open Resources Online) contains resources for teaching language available to download and reuse, including those used by the Department of Language at the Open University, UK.
MIT Open Course ware - a web-based publication of virtually all MITcourse content; Highlights for High School features MIT OpenCourseWare materials that are most useful for high school students and teachers. Other MIT resources for high schoolers are here.
WikiEducator is a community for the collaborative development of free content for e-learning and work on building open education resources (OERs) on how to create open educational resources，o.e.r.
Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning.
Harvard University Library's Open Collections Program -- an example of how a university can start by opening up limited resources.
The Open Educational Quality (OPAL) Initiative provides quidelines, tools, and collections of best practices of open education for organizations and individuals to self-assess their level of adoption and integration of Open Educational Practices (OEP). The OEP Guide includes a maturity model, detailed description of the concept, and description of the elements which constitute Open Educational Practices.
Open Course Library of Washington is the largest state-funded effort in the nation to make core college course materials available on the Web for $30 or less per class.By the time the project is completed in 2012, digitized textbook equivalents for some 81 high-enrollment classes will be available online for the more than 400,000 students enrolled in Washington’s network of community and technical colleges.
Open.Michigan is a University of Michigan initiative that enables faculty, students and others to share their open projects and resources with the global learning community. It features people and groups actively engaged in opening resources and creates a hub that connects these projects, individuals, and organizations.
PSU World Campus repository is maintained by the World Campus Learning Design team in cooperation with the Penn State Blended Learning Initiative.
Utah State OpenCourseWare is a collection of educational material used in the formal campus coursesof Utah State university.
Open Learning Initiative by Carnegie Mellon uses intelligent tutoring systems, virtual laboratories, simulations, and frequent opportunities for assessment and feedback. The special feedback loop concept is for continuous improvement. Students can join classes for self-study on their pace, teachers can use the resources for teaching.
The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) is a joint effort by the OER Center for California, Foothill-De Anza Community College District, the League for Innovation in the Community College, OCW Consortium and many other community colleges and university partners to develop and use open educational resources，o.e.r and especially open textbooks in community college courses.
LEARN NC, a program of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Education, finds the most innovative and successful practices in K–12 education and makes them available to the teachers and students of North Carolina — and the world.
University of Virginia Library - This library is a Congressionally designated depository for U.S. Government documents. The Electronic TexT Center known to many as "Etext" , served the University community's teaching and research needs in the area of humanities text encoding for over 15 years.
The Center for Open Educational Resources & Language Learning (COERLL) is one of 15 National Foreign Language Resource Centers funded by the US Department of Education. The overall mission of these federally-funded centers is to improve the teaching and learning of foreign languages by producing resources (materials and best practices) that can be profitably employed in a variety of settings.
Smarthistory.org is a free, not-for-profit, multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional art history textbook. There are videos lessons, VoiceThread lessons, and audio lessons about eras and themes in art history, they can be browsed by artist name, style of work, theme, or time period.
Open Culture is intended to collect all free audio books, textbooks, free online courses, free movies, free language lessons, free ebooks and other enriching content for education.
Bookmark : 400 Free Online Courses from Top Universities
EDUCAUSE has curated OER resources, a collection of links and resources on open educational resources，o.e.r.
University of Nottingham's Xpert repository or Jorum.ac.uk, a site set up to enable teachers to find, share and discuss teaching resources, across all of the UK's HE and FE communities.
The Buck Institute for Education (BIE), founded in 1987, is dedicated to improving 21st Century teaching and learning throughout the world by creating and disseminating products, practices and knowledge for effective Project Based Learning (PBL). You can find all kinds of resources you need to help your PBL projects. All the content on the site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Utah Open Textbook Project - Demonstrating the Cost Effectiveness and Educational Effectiveness of Open Textbooks, made possible by support from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Brigham Young University Center for the Improvement of Teacher Education and Schooling, and the Brigham Young University Department of Instructional Psychology and Technology.
The Writing Spaces offers a platform for instructers to publish shorter texts and collaborate with colleagues on longer work to aim at a library of quality open textbooks.
Wikibooks - the wikimedia community for creating free education textbooks that anyone can edit or add to; Wikijunior is for elementary level; there are 2,342 books with 35,708 pages as Jan.31,2011; Some examples of particular interest to K-12 include: High School Mathematics Extensions, Geometry of Elementary School, and basic Spanish and Physics classes
Livebinder of OER - Open Educational Resources: Share, Remix, Learn by K12 Open Ed, selected OER resources are organized into different subjects or categories.
MoodleShare is a community of Moodlers sharing their Free Moodle courses, Moodle Sites, and Moodle Units/Lessons. There are lots of courses for teacher development, online instruction and teaching with technology. Several examples like:
Courses and course materials produced by the Open High School of Utah are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Content shared via http://moodlecommons.org under CC license.
Creating e-Portfolios with Google Sites by Jen Hegna is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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