What is OER?
Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning and research resources in the public domain or released under intellectual property license that allow free use or repurposing. Includes full courses, course materials, software and tools to support access to knowledge. (Atkins, 2007)
OERs are characterized as being open and educational and have these features:
- Cost Minimization
- Accessibility
- Consumer-producer relationship
- Open Licenses
- Educational Content
OER Resources/Portals
OER Commons
A place to share and find open educational resources. Browse OER Commons
DiscoverED
From their website, "DiscoverEd is an experimental project from Creative Commons which attempts to provide scalable search and discovery for educational resources on the web. Metadata, including the license and subject information available, are exposed in the result set. We are particularly interested in open educational resources (OER) and are collaborating with other OER projects to improve search and discovery capabilities for OER, using DiscoverEd and other available tools. " Search DiscoverEd
Curriki
A community of educators, learners and committed education working together to create quality materials for teachers and students world-wide.
"Curriki is an online environment created to support the development and free distribution of world-class educational materials to anyone who needs them. Our name is a play on the combination of 'curriculum' and 'wiki' which is the technology we're using to make education universally accessible."
Connexions
A place to view/share educational modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. " Anyone may view or contribute:
- authors create and collaborate
- instructors rapidly build and share custom collections
- learners find and explore content"
Merlot
Multimedia Educational Resource Learning and Online Teaching, learning objects..
Temoa: Open Educational Portal
From their website:" Temoa is a knowledge hub that eases a public and multilingual catalog of Open Educational Resources (OER) which aims to support the education community to find those resources and materials that meet their needs for teaching and learning through a specialized and collaborative search system and social tools."
It contains educational resources categorized by area, educational level, and language described/evaluated by academic community.
OpenCourseWare Consortium
A collaboration of 200+ higher education institutions and associated organizations world-wide creating open educational content using a shared model.
From their website: "The Goals of the Consortium
- Extend the reach and impact of opencourseware by encouraging the adoption and adaptation of open educational materials around the world.
- Foster the development of additional opencourseware projects.
- Ensure the long-term sustainability of opencourseware projects by identifying ways to improve effectiveness and reduce costs."
To to participate, "institutions must have committed to publishing, under the institution's name, materials from at least 10 courses in a format that meets the agreed-upon definition of an opencourseware."
Zunia Open Educational Resources
A knowledge portal and exchange among professionals worldwide. News, events, best practices and publications on a wide range of subjects.Users can access and post news, events, best practices and publications that are searchable online and receive e-mail alerts on topics of interest.
Wisc-Online:
Digital library of web-based learning resources
P2PU
Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) is an online community of open study groups for short university-level courses- an online book club for open educational resources. The P2PU helps navigate open education materials, allows for the creation of small groups of motivated learners, and supports the design and facilitation of courses.
Video Resources
EduTube
Educational video search platform whose aim is to organize the best free online educational videos for viewing or download. Because sites such as YouTube are blocked in some institutions, educators can check this site for some of the same material.Videos are sorted by measure of quality, popularity and educational value. Also includes audio podcasts.
YouTubeEd
YouTube Educational videos. Includes categories for business, education, engineering, fine arts & design, health & medicine, history, humanities, journalism & media, law, literature, mathematics, science, and social science.
Academic Earth
A user friendly educational repository of full video courses, lectures from world scholars. Searchable by subject, university or lecturer.
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