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(What does "Endorsed by" mean?)Summary: Guide to identifying and selecting sources of open educational resources.
Open Educational Resources (OER) are “digitized materials offered freely and openly for educators, students and self-learners to use and re-use for teaching, learning and research.” Term first adopted at UNESCO’s 2002 Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries funded by the Hewlett Foundation. - from Wikipedia
Learners will be able to:
Several resources are available on the Internet that provide teachers with tools to identify and select OER for use in instruction. Some of these are: OER Commons, MERLOT, Connexions, FREE: Federal Resources for Educational Excellence, COL Knowledge Finder, and Creative Commons.
OER Commons is one of several Internet resources where you can identify and select OER. With a free membership, you can add tags, ratings, reviews, comments, and favorites to your own portfolio. You can post to discussion, blog, and wiki areas, and see how others are using OER.
OER Commons is created and produced by ISKME, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education. It is generously supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and represents dozens of collaborations with OER partners and communities across the globe.
MERLOT is a pioneer in the development of searchable and shareable online learning materials for higher education. The site provides collection of peer reviewed learning materials created by registered members. MERLOT provides criteria for peer-review of learning materials submitted.
Take a Tour of the new Merlot. Searches in MERLOT can be sorted by date, reviews ratings, title, author, and material type. A tutorial about how to search for learning materials using MERLOT is available from the SUNY Teaching, Learning, and Technology Program.
Connexions has a repository of OER that are searchable by subject, language, popularity, title, keyword, and author. The repository contains 3925 reusable modules woven into 211 collections. The content in Connexions comes in two formats: modules, which are like small "knowledge chunks," and courses, which are collections of modules. The Connexions Creative Commons open license allows for free use and reuse of all its content.
FREE: Federal Resources for Educational Excellence provides links to hundreds of education resources from or supported by the U.S. government.
WikiEducator provides several tools for identification and use of OER including the Exemplary Collection of Open eLearning Content Repositories.Lola Exchange provides learning objects and learning activities available for searching by topic, title, discipline, or author. Disciplines listed are Mathematics, Science and Technology, Social Sciences, Business, Arts, Education, and Humanities. All materials are reviewed according to standard criteria by volunteers. Curriki is a global education and learning community dedicated to providing quality learning materials worldwide. Learning materials can be searched by the following topics:Arts, Educational Technology, Foreign Languages, Health, Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, and Vocational Education. A re-launch of the site is planned soon to add the following new features:
COL Knowledge Finder is a service that searches reliable sources of information in open and distance learning and provides organization tools. Emphasis is on international development goals like poverty alleviation, health and education for all. The COL Knowledge Finder service is provided by The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) which is an intergovernmental organisation created by Commonwealth Heads of Government to encourage the development and sharing of open learning and distance education knowledge, resources and technologies. To use the search tool, click on "Search". Then follow the guidelines on the screen. More details are available from the Orientation. Training videos for effective searching and use of the COL Knowledge Finder tools are available.
Creative Commons provides a way to find shareable photos, music, text, books, and other educational material utilizing Creative Commons enabled search services at Google, Yahoo!, Flickr, blip.tv, Owlmusic, and SpinXpress. A Content Curators wiki area is available that provides a list of curators of Creative Commons-licensed content. Users are invited to contribute to and edit this list themselves.
Take a tour of Edu2.0 to discover all browsable shared course content organized by topic. Resources include quizzes, webquests, presentations, projects, experiments, courses, classes, curricula, audio, video, powerpoint, excel and other kinds of attachments.
Experience
Reflect
"Share your thoughts, experiences and expertise on the OER movement, its challenges and potential impact. Why does OER matter, how does it work, and what are the possibilities for the future of use and re-use of open education content?"
Apply
1. Review learning materials at OER Commons. Type keywords in the Search box in the upper right corner of the screen to identify at least one OER to review.
2. Submit your review of some learning materials at MERLOT. You will need to become a member before you can submit your review.
3. If you know of a good source of open educational resources, submit the Internet address for inclusion on the COL Knowledge Finder submit-a-site page.
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This work is licensed by Judy Baker under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 2.0), and is an Open Educational Resource.
Last edited by Judy Baker on Jun 27, 2007 7:03 pm GMT-5.
"Accessible versions of this collection are available at Bookshare. DAISY and BRF provided."