Open Educational Resources On Open Learning



There is often a confusion between Open Learning (or open education) and Open Educational Resources (OER). Opening learning is much more complex than simply providing open educational resources, or OER. But OER can help because they are resources that are freely available on the Internet – you can download them for free, without having to go through the lengthy and often costly process of asking for permission to use them. TheSAIDE OER policy expresses this as follows:
At its core, the concept of Open Educational Resources (OER) describes educational resources that are freely available for use by educators and learners, without an accompanying need to pay royalties or licence fees. A broad spectrum of frameworks is emerging to govern how OER is licensed for use, some of which simply allow copying and others that make provision for users to adapt the resources that they use. The most well known of these are the Creative Commons (CC) licences, which provide legal mechanisms to ensure that people can retain acknowledgement for their work while allowing it to be shared, restricting commercial activity if they so wish, and aim to prevent people adapting work if appropriate (although this may be legally difficult to enforce at the margins).
For more information about OER, go to the Wikipedia entry on Open Educational Resources. This entry is itself an OER – and you can not only use it without asking permission or paying anything, but also even edit and expand the entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources
There are increasing numbers of OER becoming available on the Web – courses and resources for use in education.
The following are useful sites to explore.
  • http://www.tessafrica.net/ - TESSA brings together teachers and teacher educators from across Africa. It offers a range of materials (Open Educational Resources) in four languages to support school-based teacher education and training.
  • http://freelearning.bccampus.ca/ – This Canadian based web site offers free, open educational resources from across the globe.
  • The Open University's LearningSpace site, at http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/, 'gives free access to Open University course materials. In the LearningSpace, you will find hundreds of free study units, each with a discussion forum. Study independently at your own pace or join a group and use the free learning tools to work with others.'
  • http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org/index.php?title=Main_Page – This UNESCO site contains links to a great many open educational resources for educators.
  • http://www.youtube.com/edu - 20,000 videos at the time of launching (in March 2009) - all produced by educators in higher education
  • http://academicearth.org/ - 'thousands of video lectures from the world's top scholars'
  • http://www.younitube.com/ - also known as Lectr.com - more videos for learning
  • http://www.curriki.org/ - 'Curriki is an online environment created to support the development and free distribution of world-class educational materials to anyone who needs them.'
These are just a few of the free resources available on the Web - the list is growing by the day.
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