Open Education Resources
Definition: Wikipedia defines OERs as “educational materials and resources offered freely and openly for anyone to use and under some licenses to re-mix, improve and redistribute.”
- Analogy: Think of OERs like a delicious cookie recipe that circulates the Internet freely for other people to use, modify and share.
- Story: Sara has a wonderful family cookie recipe that she would like to share. So, she decides to post the recipe online so that her friend Michiko and others can find it. Upon printing off the recipe, Michiko decides to add dark chocolate chips to the recipe and finds that the cookies are much improved. So, she passes the recipe along to several others via the Internet. Mustafa gets a hold of the recipe and decides it would benefit from some rock salt and an egg yolk. He then posts the recipe for others to see… And so on! Just replace the cookie recipe just described with a lesson plan, educational video or collaboratively developed educational resource and you’ve got yourself an OER! To learn more about OERs, click here.
- Summary: Free and open K-12 science and math “textbooks”
- “CK-12 Foundation is a non-profit organization with a mission to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the U.S. and worldwide. Using an open-content, web-based collaborative model termed the “FlexBook,” CK-12 intends to pioneer the generation and distribution of high quality educational content that will serve both as core text as well as provide an adaptive environment for learning.”
- Summary: Free and open K-12 curricula and resources (all subjects)
- “Curriki is a social entrepreneurship organization that supports the development and free distribution of open source educational materials to improve education worldwide. The online community gives teachers, students and parents universal access to a wealth of peer-reviewed K-12 curricula, and powerful online collaboration tools… The site has already been translated into Spanish, French, Hindi and Bahasa. Moving forward Curriki aims to become a primary resource of Arabic language reading and curricula materials as well.”
- Summary: Free and open K-3 early literacy curricula and resources
- “FreeReading is a high-quality, open-source, free reading intervention program addressing literacy development for grades K-3. Schools and teachers everywhere can use the complete, research-based 40-week program for K-1 students, or use the library of lessons to supplement existing curricula in phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing. The site is also filled with free, downloadable supplemental materials including flashcards, graphical organizers, illustrated readers, decodable texts, audio files, videos and more.”
- Summary: Free and open K-3 early literacy curricula and resources
- “FreeReading is a high-quality, open-source, free reading intervention program addressing literacy development for grades K-3. Schools and teachers everywhere can use the complete, research-based 40-week program for K-1 students, or use the library of lessons to supplement existing curricula in phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing. The site is also filled with free, downloadable supplemental materials including flashcards, graphical organizers, illustrated readers, decodable texts, audio files, videos and more.”
- Summary: Free and open K-20 educational resources across multiple subjects / languages from Rice University
- “Connexions is an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web. Our Content Commons contains educational materials for everyone — from children to college students to professionals — organized in small modules that are easily connected into larger collections or courses. All content is free to use and reuse under the Creative Commons “attribution” license.”
- Summary: Free and open high school, undergraduate and graduate online courses and materials from MIT.
- “MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.”
- Summary: Free and open K-20 curricula and resources (all subjects)
- “OER Commons has forged alliances with over 120 major content partners to provide a single point of access through which educators and learners can search across collections to access over 24,000 items, find and provide descriptive information about each resource, and retrieve the ones they need. By being “open,” these resources are publicly available for all to use, and principally through Creative Commons licensing, many thousands are legally available for repurposing, modifying and improving.”
- Summary: Free and open courses from Chinese and International Universities
- “CORE—China Open Resource for Education— is a non-profit organization. Her mission is to promote closer interaction and open sharing of educational resources between Chinese and international universities, which CORE envisions as the future of world education.”
- Summary: Free and open courses from Kyoto University (materials are in Japanese)
- Summary: Free and open university courses from Middle East Technical University (primarily math and science)
- “The idea behind METU OpenCourseWare OCW is to make METU OpenCourseWare course materials that are used in the teaching of undergraduate and graduate subjects available on the Web, free of charge, to any user anywhere in the world.”
- Summary: Free and open university courses from Carnegie Melon (primarily math and science)
- “Using intelligent tutoring systems, virtual laboratories, simulations, and frequent opportunities for assessment and feedback, the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) builds courses that are intended to enact instruction – or, more precisely, to enact the kind of dynamic, flexible, and responsive instruction that fosters learning.”
- Summary: Free and open university courses from ParisTech (primarily math and science, materials are in French)
- “November 2003, ParisTech launched an ambitious project to promote, gather and give free access to the largest number of courses materials from the then 11 member Instituts : ” ParisTech Libres Savoirs ” meaning literally “ParisTech free Knowleges”. This is the main goal of the ParisTech Graduate School website.”
- Summary: Free and open university courses from Carnegie Melon (primarily math and science)
- “Using intelligent tutoring systems, virtual laboratories, simulations, and frequent opportunities for assessment and feedback, the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) builds courses that are intended to enact instruction – or, more precisely, to enact the kind of dynamic, flexible, and responsive instruction that fosters learning.”
- Summary: Free and open university courses from Tufts (primarily science and medicine)
- “The Tufts OpenCourseWare (OCW) project is a web-based publication of educational material from Tufts University courses from all three campuses, with a strong representation of medicine, veterinary medicine, dentistry, and nutrition courses. Under the Creative Commons license, the website provides open sharing of free, searchable course content to educators, students, and self-learners throughout the world.”
- Summary: Free and open university courses from the United Nations (primarily human security, peace and development)
- “The idea behind UNU OCW is to make course materials that are used by UNU Research and Training Centres and Programmes available on the Web, free of charge, to any user anywhere in the world.”
- Read how student Kunle Adejumo is using OERs to help complete his engineering studies at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria and how he plans to broadcast OERs to educate over the local radio so that more students can benefit from these free materials.
- Read how Professor Triatno Yudo Harjoko is using OERs to create courses at the University of Indonesia
- Read how Bangalore-based applications engineer Harihar Subramanian is using OERs in the workplace.
- Read other stories about how OERs are being used around the world from students, educators, self-learners and professions here.
- Summary: Free copyright information, licenses and advice for users and creators or OERs
- “Our tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work. The Creative Commons licenses enable people to easily change their copyright terms from the default of ‘all rights reserved’ to ‘some rights reserved.’”
- Watch this video to gain a quick understanding of Creative Commons and how to copyright your work
What people are saying about OERs and the Impact of Technology on Educational Access
“The advent of the Web brings the ability to disseminate high-quality materials at almost no cost, leveling the playing field…We’re changing the culture of how we think about knowledge and how it should be shared and who are the owners of knowledge.”
- Cathy Casserly, senior partner, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
- Source: “How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education” (Fast Company, 2009)
“We do not yet know the full potential of OCW and its ultimate impact on global education. But it is clear to us that by thinking of knowledge as a public good for the benefit of all, and acting on this philosophy through OpenCourseWare, we can make a difference. We know from our evaluation research and from many thousands of user feedback emails that OCW is improving education and bringing new opportunities to people everywhere. We expect this impact will continue to grow in ways we have already seen and in ways we have not yet imagined.”
- Susan Hockfield, president, MIT
- Source: Presidents Message (MIT OpenCourseWare, 2009)
“Open Educational Resources promote the sharing of knowledge worldwide to increase human intellectual capacity…UNESCO can encourage the development of OER in education, culture and religion to enhance mutual understanding for international peace.”
- Source: UNESCO Second Global Forum on International Quality Assurance, Accreditation and the Recognition of Qualifications in Higher Education, “Widening Access to Quality Higher Education” (UNESCO, 2004)
“Open development of educational resources promises significant benefits over commercial development. It can tap many more contributors. It can avoid the pitfalls of too heavy an emphasis on pleasing large numbers of school districts and teachers with a standard product, as opposed to producing many narrowly-tailored high-end learning objects that can then be integrated differently by different teachers and learners, according to their own needs, styles, and emphases.”
- Yochai Benkler, Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, Harvard
- Source: Common Wisdom: Peer Production of Educational Materials (Benkler, 2005)
