Definition

Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning materials freely available in the public domain. A definition of OER from the The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is:

"OER are teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials or techniques used to support access to knowledge."

The term OER has been used to refer to learning materials such as:

Background

Hewlett Foundation has taken a pioneering role in the development and use of OER with its support of many initiatives: "The Open Educational Resources movement began in 2001 when the Hewlett and the Andrew W. Mellon foundations jointly funded MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), the first institution committed to making all of its course materials freely available. Since then, more than 60 additional institutions have launched OpenCourseWare Web sites." Just some of the many OER initatives supported by the Hewlett Foundation include:

The Open Educational Resources movement is part of a global effort to make knowledge available to all.  The UNESCO's Virtual University Forum provides an overview about definitions, initiatives, and community-building. Many repositories of open learning materials are listed at the Open Educational Resources (OER) Index.

Case Study

In his May 2006 article "Bye the Book My year of teaching environmental science without a textbook" Eric Pallant describes how he and co-professor Terry Bensel experimented with teaching their Introduction to Environmental Science course at Allegheny College with no textbook. Instead they used a variety of open educational resources. Based on self-report, 41 of 46 students in their first-semester class read the same or more than they would have in a textbook. The experiment proved successful enough that the entire academic department has embraced the concept of OER. Faculty have distributed the work of collecting and banking websites for common use.

Sustainability

Recently, several websites have become available that provide tools to support the identification, development, use, re-use, collaboration, and delivery of open learning content including searching and organization of content. Some websites, such as: OER Commons, Open Learn, Open Content, WikiEducator, Connexions, OWL Institute, and OERderves, are devoted to nurturing online learning communities, wikis, and blogs on various aspects of OER. Also, a new journal has gone online with a focus on OER: Eduforge: The International Journal of Open Education Resources.

Experience

1. Get connected and become a part of the OER movement community:

2. Read at least one of the following about the OER movement:

Reflect

1. Once you have joined OER Commons, make your own posting to the OER Matters Discussions area. Click on OER Matters Teaching and Learning Forum to answer the following question:

"Opening up new avenues for teachers and learners to select and augment learning resources that meet one’s unique teaching and learning needs is the basic mission behind OER. But how do OER impact teaching and learning and what are the issues that we need to take into consideration?""

Apply

Now that you have a general idea of what OER is all about, you should be ready to make a couple of decisions:

1. Do you want to learn more about OER?

2. Do you want to get the most out of this learning experience?