Open Educational Resources/Lesson



This lesson introduces Open Educational Resources (OER) and provides essential background information and understanding for educators preparing to develop and use OER content. Activities include a review of different OER repositories, content availability and restrictions.

Readings

 * 1)  Open educational resources
 * 2)  Wikiversity: Open Educational Resources
 * 3) WikiEducator: OER Handbook for Educators
 * 4)  Creative Commons license

Activities

 * 1) Review the  lesson summary,  key terms,  review questions and  flashcards below.
 * 2) Use the  Discuss page to post comments and questions regarding this lesson.
 * 3) Consider ways in which open educational resources might be used to enhance content offerings for your students.
 * 4) Create a table to compare OER repositories.  Include columns for Repository, Content Types Available, Education Level, Audience, Quality, License, Who Can Contribute, Approval Process, and Notes.  Based on your discipline and your students' educational level, select and compare relevant repositories and some of the content available.  For example:

Lesson Summary

 * Open educational resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly formatted and openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, education, assessment and research purposes.
 * Available OER content types include courses, modules, lessons, textbooks, and a variety of other resources.
 * Different OER initiatives have been established targeting a variety of content types (courses, textbooks, or individual learning objects), target audiences (educators, parents, students), and contributor qualifications (contract, peer-reviewed, open).
 * Most OER are now licensed under one of several Creative Commons public copyright licenses that allow the distribution of copyrighted works.

Key Terms

 * accessibility
 * The degree to which a product, device, service, or environment is available to as many people as possible.


 * CC-BY
 * Creative Commons - Attribution license.


 * CC-BY-NC-SA
 * Creative Commons - Attribution - Non-Commercial - Share Alike license.


 * CC-BY-SA
 * Creative Commons - Attribution - Share Alike license.


 * Creative Commons license
 * One of several public copyright licenses that allow the distribution of copyrighted works.


 * digital divide
 * An economic inequality between groups, broadly construed, in terms of access to, use of, or knowledge of information and communication technologies (ICT).


 * open content
 * Describes a creative work that others can copy or modify.

Flashcards

 * Test your understanding of the key terms.