In an effort to evolve and innovate with the field of education and eLearning, I have been slowly gleaning information on Open Educational Resources (OERs).
On May 30, 2019 I attended the Colorado Open Education Ambassadors day and became an “OER Ambassador.” What this means is simply to advocate and implement OERs when and wherever possible within my work in education and beyond.
What is an OER?
Open = Free + Permissions
Free as in no financial barriers for students, free exchange of knowledge, control to educators, and scalable.
Permissions as in you can copy, share, edit, mix, keep, and use under a Creative Commons license.
Why OERs?
Textbook prices have increased over the last 3 decades by 3-4x’s the rate of inflation (Ernst, 2019). When we consider all the chain of events here, ultimately this has lead to many things influence student decisions to buy books, take fewer courses, not register for courses, earn poor grades, drop courses, withdraw from a course, and fail a course (Ernst, 2019).
In the end, we have influence over textbooks as educational developers and designers in a way we do not have influence over other costs of education. Why not OERs? This is perhaps the more important question.
But! OERs are low quality, poorly done, and don’t have credibility…
I encourage you to rethink the reputation implied here. Explore the resources below. OpenStax and the Open Textbook Network are two examples of open textbook repositories and authoring institutions who maintain extremely high quality and credibility support from instructors and faculty from around the globe. The other resources are also credible resources recommended by many colleagues and network connections over the past few years.
Resources
Open Textbook Repositories
- OpenStax.org
- OpenTextbookNetwork.edu
- MERLOT.org
- SkillsCommons.org
- Directory of Open Access Books (DOAbooks.org)
- Open.edu – CC4.0 BY NC SA
- OASIS Textbooks
- Open Culture Textbooks
Open Educational Resources and Courseware Repositories
- MERLOT.org
- SkillsCommons.org
- Wikiedu.org
- OERCommons.org
- The Mason OER Metafinder (MOM)
- Digital Public Library of America (https://dp.la/)
- MITOpenCourseware.edu
- VirginiaTech OER Page
- OASIS Materials
- OEConsortium.org
- Archive.org
Open Courses
Topic Specialty OERs
- Language – Live Lingua
- Legal Education – CALI – Computer Assisted Legal Instruction
- Transition to College – Bridge2Success.aacc.edu
- Science – ScienceForward CUNY
- Science and Math – PhET Interactive Simulations
- Open Science MOOC – https://opensciencemooc.eu
I’ll post resources, ideas, and more to this page in an evolving and fluid manner. If you have anything you’d like me to add to the list, please fill out this form:
Cover Image: Photo by Nitin Arya from Pexels