Open Educational Resources

Getting Started: What is an Open Educational Resource? 
  • What are Open Edu­ca­tion­al Resources? From BCcam­pus: short con­cise descrip­tion of what an Open Edu­ca­tion­al Resource is, the rela­tion­ship to open ped­a­gogy and some ben­e­fits of using OERs. Includes links to fur­ther read­ings. 
  • Open Edu­ca­tion Primer  From SPARC* An overview of OER and Open edu­ca­tion­al prac­tices. It is a liv­ing document/textbook. “Wel­come to the Open Text­book Primer, the text­book for the SPARC Open Edu­ca­tion Lead­er­ship Pro­gram. This resource is intend­ed to pro­vide an intro­duc­tion to open edu­ca­tion for aca­d­e­m­ic librar­i­ans in North Amer­i­ca, with empha­sis on the three pil­lars of resources, prac­tices, and pol­i­cy.  “
    • FYI: From Sparcopen.org “SPARC (the Schol­ar­ly Pub­lish­ing and Aca­d­e­m­ic Resources Coali­tion) works to enable the open shar­ing of research out­puts and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als in order to democ­ra­tize access to knowl­edge, accel­er­ate dis­cov­ery, and increase the return on our invest­ment in research and edu­ca­tion. As a cat­a­lyst for action, SPARC focus­es on col­lab­o­rat­ing with oth­er stakeholders—including authors, pub­lish­ers, libraries, stu­dents, fun­ders, pol­i­cy­mak­ers and the public—to build on the oppor­tu­ni­ties cre­at­ed by the Inter­net, pro­mot­ing changes to both infra­struc­ture and cul­ture need­ed to make open the default for research and edu­ca­tion.”

  • Open Edu­ca­tion­al Resources Info From Unesco.org “Open Edu­ca­tion­al Resources (OER) are 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. OER forms part of ‘Open Solu­tions’, along­side Free and Open Source soft­ware (FOSS), Open Access (OA), Open Data (OD) and crowd­sourc­ing plat­forms.” Unesco Rec­om­men­da­tions on OER:  “The Rec­om­men­da­tion on OER — adopt­ed unan­i­mous­ly by the UNESCO Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence at its 40th ses­sion in Novem­ber 2019 — sup­ports the cre­ation, use and adap­ta­tion of inclu­sive and qual­i­ty OER, and facil­i­tates inter­na­tion­al coop­er­a­tion in this field. “
Finding Open Educational Resources
Creating an Open Educational Resource
  • Press­Books account with BCcam­pus “BCcam­pus Open Edu­ca­tion has cre­at­ed a self-serve instance of Press­books. This is avail­able for instruc­tors and staff from post-sec­ondary insti­tu­tions in British Colum­bia and the Yukon. Please note, when sign­ing up for an account, you must use your insti­tu­tion­al email.”
  • OER Com­mons: Cre­ate with Author Anoth­er author­ing tool ‘Open Author” avail­able through the OER Com­mons. Easy to use edi­tor, acces­si­bil­i­ty fea­tures, “remix­able, curate­able, find­able”.
  • Iowa State OER Starter Kit  “This starter kit has been cre­at­ed to pro­vide instruc­tors with an intro­duc­tion to the use and cre­ation of open edu­ca­tion­al resources (OER). The text is bro­ken into five sec­tions: Get­ting Start­ed, Copy­right, Find­ing OER, Teach­ing with OER, and Cre­at­ing OER. Although some chap­ters con­tain more advanced con­tent, the starter kit is pri­mar­i­ly intend­ed for users who are entire­ly new to Open Edu­ca­tion. [Ver­sion 1.1. Revised Sep­tem­ber 5th, 2019.]
  • Chap­ter “Tools And Tech­niques for Cre­at­ing OER Includes short video (5:17) with tips for con­sid­er­ing an OER (cre­ation and use). Low, medi­um and high tech options are dis­cussed.
  • UBC: Cre­at­ing Open Edu­ca­tion­al Resources A UBC focus but some good gen­er­al (and prac­ti­cal) infor­ma­tion on OERs get­ting start­ed on cre­at­ing them.
Student Created Open resources
Good Collections to Start Exploring

Open edu­ca­tion resources (OERs) are defined in many ways. UNESCO defines them as 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.

Find­ing good resources for your cours­es takes time. Since there are many col­lec­tions host­ed by dif­fer­ent orga­ni­za­tions, each has their own way of orga­niz­ing and search­ing resouces. Some like MERLOT are ‘refer­ra­to­ries’ point­ing to resources host­ed on oth­er sites but they also pro­vide feed­back and rat­ings from users. Oth­er col­lec­tions are sub-sets or curat­ed lists of larg­er col­lec­tions like OER Com­mons Curat­ed Col­lec­tions. We’ve includ­ed a music and image col­lec­tion of resources.

BASE

4BASE is one of the world’s most volu­mi­nous search engines espe­cial­ly for aca­d­e­m­ic web resources. BASE pro­vides more than 150 mil­lion doc­u­ments from more than 7,000 sources. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed doc­u­ments for free (Open Access). BASE is oper­at­ed by Biele­feld Uni­ver­si­ty Library.

BCcampus Open Textbook Collection

https://collection.bccampus.ca/
The B.C. Open Text­book Col­lec­tion is home to a grow­ing selec­tion of open text­books for a vari­ety of sub­jects and spe­cial­ties. Dis­cov­er open text­books that have been reviewed by fac­ul­ty, meet our acces­si­bil­i­ty require­ments, and/or include ancil­lary mate­ri­als (quizzes, test banks, slides, videos, etc.).

OASIS

https://oasis.geneseo.edu/index.php
Open­ly Avail­able Sources Inte­grat­ed Search (OASIS) is a search tool that aims to make the dis­cov­ery of open con­tent eas­i­er. OASIS cur­rent­ly search­es open con­tent from 97 dif­fer­ent sources and con­tains 385,629 records. OASIS is being devel­oped at SUNY Gene­seo’s Milne Library.

Libre Texts

https://libretexts.org/
The Libre­Text Project, a lead­ing, non-com­mer­cial open text­book orga­ni­za­tion ini­ti­at­ed at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Davis. The Libre­Texts mis­sion is to unite stu­dents, fac­ul­ty and schol­ars in a coop­er­a­tive effort to devel­op an easy-to-use online plat­form for the con­struc­tion, cus­tomiza­tion, and dis­sem­i­na­tion of open edu­ca­tion­al resources (OER) to reduce the bur­dens of unrea­son­able text­book costs to our stu­dents and soci­ety.

OER Commons Curated Collections

https://www.oercommons.org/curated-collections
OER Com­mons forges alliances between trust­ed con­tent providers and cre­ative users and re-users of OER. In addi­tion to con­tent part­ner­ships, OER Com­mons, and its cre­ator, ISKME, builds strate­gic rela­tion­ships with orga­ni­za­tions, con­sor­tia, states, dis­tricts, and oth­ers, in order to devel­op inno­va­tion and new research focused on OER, to advance the field of open edu­ca­tion, and to build mod­els for its sus­tain­abil­i­ty. Sup­port­ed in part by the William and Flo­ra Hewlett Foun­da­tion, ISKME, the Insti­tute for the Study of Knowl­edge Man­age­ment in Edu­ca­tion, cre­at­ed OER Com­mons as part of the Foundation’s world­wide OER ini­tia­tive. Part of OER Com­mons https://www.oercommons.org/

National Science Digital Library

https://nsdl.oercommons.org/
The Nation­al Sci­ence Dig­i­tal Library pro­vides high qual­i­ty online edu­ca­tion­al resources for teach­ing and learn­ing, with cur­rent empha­sis on the sci­ences, tech­nol­o­gy, engi­neer­ing, and math­e­mat­ics (STEM) disciplines—both for­mal and infor­mal, insti­tu­tion­al and indi­vid­ual, in local, state, nation­al, and inter­na­tion­al edu­ca­tion­al set­tings. The NSDL col­lec­tion con­tains struc­tured descrip­tive infor­ma­tion (meta­da­ta) about web-based edu­ca­tion­al resources held on oth­er sites by their providers.

MERLOT

https://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm
The MERLOT project began in 1997, when the Cal­i­for­nia State Uni­ver­si­ty Cen­ter for Dis­trib­uted Learn­ing (CSU-CDL at cdl.edu) devel­oped and pro­vid­ed free access to MERLOT (www.merlot.org). In July, 2000, twen­ty-three (23) sys­tems and insti­tu­tions of high­er edu­ca­tion had become Insti­tu­tion­al Part­ners of MERLOT. Each Insti­tu­tion­al Part­ner con­tributed $25,000 and in-kind sup­port for eight fac­ul­ty and a project direc­tor (part-time) to coor­di­nate MERLOT activ­i­ties. The CSU con­tin­ued its lead­er­ship of and respon­si­bil­i­ties for the oper­a­tion and improve­ment of process­es and tools.

CCMixter

http://ccmixter.org/
Down­load, cut up, mix share. Open music for any­one to use.

Unsplash

https://unsplash.com/
The internet’s source of freely-usable images.

Pexels

https://www.pexels.com/
Free stock pho­tos and videos.

Pixabay

https://pixabay.com/
Free images and roy­al­ty free stock video and music

Ted Ed Lessons

https://ed.ted.com/lessons
TED-Ed’s mis­sion is to spark and cel­e­brate the ideas of teach­ers and stu­dents around the world. Every­thing we do sup­ports learn­ing — from pro­duc­ing a grow­ing library of orig­i­nal ani­mat­ed videos , to pro­vid­ing an inter­na­tion­al plat­form for teach­ers to cre­ate their own inter­ac­tive lessons, to help­ing curi­ous stu­dents around the globe bring TED to their schools and gain pre­sen­ta­tion lit­er­a­cy skills, to cel­e­brat­ing inno­v­a­tive lead­er­ship with­in TED-Ed’s glob­al net­work of over 250,000 teach­ers.