What are openly available learning resources?
In this context, we define openly available learning resources as:
- Digital learning resources that are freely available online for everyone to use, whether you are an instructor, student or self-learner
- They can be any digital teaching and learning material used to promote and support learning. This can include videos, online activities, lab and classroom activities, quizzes, images, diagrams, course materials, presentations, syllabi, assignments, full courses, pedagogical materials, games, podcasts, simulations, handbooks, templates and forms, and so on.
- They are available from digital media collections from around the world.
- They have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. One such commonly used license is Creative Commons
- They are commonly known as Open Educational Resources (OER).
Adapted from: OER Commons
Who is using OER?
Locally at NTU
Increasing numbers of colleagues from many subject disciplines are creating, sharing and re-using learning resources through NOW's learning repositories. Examples of the types of resources that have already been shared are:
- Module handbooks/guides
- Information literacy materials for students
- Modern language learning aids
- A selection of printed legal resources
- Assignment templates
- Instructional videos on NOW and AutoCAD.
In fact there are over 700 resources available for NTU staff to browse and use in their NOW learning rooms.
The global education community
From large institution-based or institution-supported initiatives to numerous small-scale activities, the number of OER related programmes and projects has been growing quickly over the past few years.
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2007, there are materials from more than 3000 open access courses currently available from over 300 universities worldwide. Here's a taster of just some of those:
In the United States, resources from thousands of courses have been made available by university-based projects, such as MIT OpenCourseWare and Rice University's Connexions project.
In China, materials from 750 courses have been made available by 222 university members of the China Open Resources for Education (CORE) consortium.
In Japan, resources from more than 400 courses have been made available by the 19 member universities of the Japanese OCW Consortium
In France, 800 educational resources from around 100 teaching units have been made available by the 11 member universities of the ParisTech OCW project
In Ireland, universities received government funding to build open access institutional repositories and to develop a resource discovery service via a national portal. It is intended that this collaboration will be expanded to embrace all Irish research institutions. (http://www.irel-open.ie/).
In the UK, the Open University has released a range of its distance learning materials via the OpenLearn project, and 29 UK OER projects have released many resources (via JorumOpen) which are used to support teaching in institutions and subject areas (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/oer).
Adapted from the HEA and JISC Open Educational Resources InfoKit [Accessed 4/8/11] Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales]
References
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2007). Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources. Paris: OECD. Available from: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/35/7/38654317.pdf [Accessed 23/9/11].