Open Educational Resources/Introduction

Open educational resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes. It is the leading trend in distance education/open and distance learning domain as a consequence of the openness movement. There is no universal usage of open file formats in OER.

The development and promotion of open educational resources is often motivated by a desire to provide an alternate or enhanced educational paradigm.

Defining the scope and nature of open educational resources
The idea of open educational resources (OER) has numerous working definitions. The term was firstly coined at UNESCO's 2002 Forum on Open Courseware and designates "teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. Open licensing is built within the existing framework of intellectual property rights as defined by relevant international conventions and respects the authorship of the work". Often cited is the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation term which defines OER as:

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 and 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.

Drivers for OER
Driver of application of OER:
 * Maximize public access to educational resources especially in a developing countries. If financial resources are not available, then access to commercial educational resources are not possible (see Risk Management). Therefore the impact of the educational resources are reduced due to the financial constraints. Open Educational Resources can reach even disadvantage
 * trigger innovation by accessing the educational resource and learn about new concepts and approaches
 * reducing developing costs for Educational Resources because the authors do not have to build from scratch, but can build, remix or translate existing capacity building material.

OER and Organisations
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defines OER as: "digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students, and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning, and research. OER includes learning content, software tools to develop, use, and distribute content, and implementation resources such as open licences". (This is the definition cited by Wikipedia's sister project, Wikiversity.) By way of comparison, the Commonwealth of Learning "has adopted the widest definition of Open Educational Resources (OER) as 'materials offered freely and openly to use and adapt for teaching, learning, development and research'". The WikiEducator project suggests that OER refers "to educational resources (lesson plans, quizzes, syllabi, instructional modules, simulations, etc.) that are freely available for use, reuse, adaptation, and sharing'.

Open Community Approach
According to the definition of the Open Community Approach (AT6FUI) Open Educational Resources are a key element of capacity building.
 * use Open Source Software if software is needed in the learning environment
 * use Open Data if data is needed for data for learning analytic skills
 * use Open Content to create Open Educational Resources
 * use Open Proposal Management (see AT6FUI OpenProposal Management ) for research on creation, application and adaptation of OER to requirements and constraints of the learners.

Learning Tasks

 * Introduction: Learn about OER sources and licensing.
 * FAIR Principle Explain the role of FAIR principle in the context of OER.
 * Educational Content Sink: Learn about Wikiversity as Educational Content Sink.
 * Generate Slides from Wikiversity: Convert a wikiversity content of your choice with Wiki2Reveal into an slide show on the fly. You can annotate the slideshow in your browser. With PanDocElectron conversion into a web based presentation is possible (see e.g. Audioslideshow with RevealJS)
 * OER and Mobile Devices: Create a strategy document how to use, share and adapt OER for mobile devices.
 * OER and Risk Literacy: Learn about Risk Literacy derive rationals for application of OER in the context of Risk Mitigation strategies especially in developing countries
 * ../Localization of OER/: Tailor educational resources to specific requirements and constraints of the target group or use-case.
 * (Optimization) Learning resources can be optimized in a community driven approach by the analysis of the different use-cases of the learning resources. General content are shared as intersection of learning resources and specialities are covered separately in the different course curriculums.
 * (Open Badge Management and Localization) Analyse the concept of localization of learning resources to individual requirements and constraints and derive your implications for issuing badges and certificates (e.g. meta data in badge for applied use cases).
 * (Reader2Author) to encourage learners to become active contributors to Wikiversity can be regarded as a learning task for advanced Wikiversity authors in general. Visit the Exploratory Study on OpenSource Education and improve the content in terms of
 * (technical skills) improve the citations so that they the references are processed in MediaWiki standards.
 * (semantic improvement) analyse the link between the presented topic of "OpenSource in education" there and OER in general.
 * (submoduls) if applicable create submoduls of OER with additional information listed here or link in an appropriate way to the other Wikiversity resource. Insert your proposal for merging of reorganisation of a learning resource in talk page of the referred learning resource.
 * (Watchlist) Put your the article you work on on your own watchlist as authenticated Wikiversity User, to keep informed on changes about the topic.