Open Educational Resources:

The Spirit of the Web Applied to Learning and Teaching

Welcome to this wiki, which will be our virtual arena for this workshop session; in fact, technically speaking we will be in a blended environment, since we will be physically present during the session but also connected to the same virtual space. Moreover, you do not need to take any notes and can access this information from anywhere as long as you have a connection to the Internet, which is one of the great advantages of blended models.

In this session (and, if we continue to work on this wiki, afterwards as well) I would like to share what I have come across so far regarding OERs. I am not an ICT teacher, but I have been interested in ICT since my childhood. Having my first computer and then getting access to the Internet had a big impact in the way I learnt and worked, and especially since I moved to Singapore to work at UWCSEA technology has permeated more and more my professional practice.

I had always wanted to have the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but had neither the money nor the space to hold the volimonous collection. When the DVD edition was launched I bought it with one of my first salaries and it meant a lot to me to have the 2+ Gigs of information accesible on my desktop computer.

Later on I, when I had my first laptop, which was wireless enabled, I realised that the traditional encyclopedia does not stand a chance against the community of knowers who share their expertise, andWikipedia was precisely that. At the time it was called Nupedia, and I contributed to some articles to it. Today, mobile devices continue to expand our access to information in a way that would have seen as sci-fi a couple of decades ago. This is a great tool for equity, somehow loosely connected with the ideals of the French Revolution: Knowledge Egalité!

What are Open Educational Resources (OERs)?

This is probably the most succint explanation I have found:

"In 2002, UNESCO coined the term, Open Educational Resources (OER). OER refers to the “open provision of educational resources enabled by information and communication technologies, for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for non-commercial purposes”. It includes open content, as well as software tools and standards.
If content and software can be shared openly and freely, then educators and learners worldwide will benefit. Educators can review, adapt and translate content for their own teaching and institutional setting. Learners can access materials for independent study. Software can be shared, adapted and translated for local use." (Source)

The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) is playing a key role in spreading the concept. Their publication Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources, distributed freely as a pdf document, although focused on higher education, must be read by anyone interested in OER, for it offers a systematic analysis of where we are and where we can get to with OER.

Why should I care?

If you have ever used shared resources you know how wonderful it is when a team of ten teachers contribute a resource each and suddenly you have ten different resources to choose from! Imagine this happening not at the level of a school's department, but globally... This is the OER dream, and there are thousands of people contributing to making this dream come true.

This collective effort is closely related to other efforts to expand the access to knowledge across both the physical and the virtual world:

• Wikipedia may be the example par excellence, and whatever its shortcomings, it certainly provides access to an increasingly expanding range of contents which is quite often of very good quality.
  
• Another good example is Google's Books project aims at providing full access to tens of thousands of books online. If you belong to the generations that spend hours at a university library going through drawers and drawers of book cards in order to have access to a book, the ability to search for and access a book directly from any computer with internet access is certainly mind-boggling.
• Even the TeachIT wiki is an initiative along these lines!

How do I use OER?

I would say that it makes perfect educational sense for us to use them first to experience how they work before we use them with our students. OERs can provide a fantastic professional development opportunity somehow resembling the traditional distance-learning course but with the added benefit that we can pick and choose what we want to do- gratis!

This seems a good moment to open a new tab in your browser and search for OERs that you can use in your area of expertise. Try using the following OER repositories:

1. OER Commons
2. MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching)
   

How did it go? You can share it here.

How do I create OER?

If you have time, you can have a go at creating OERs yourself!

1. Go to Rice University's Connexions and create a course with resources already available there. You need to create (a free) account, and that's it!
   
2. Do you want to share your Connexions-experience here?
3. Go to the UK's Open University LabSpace and explore how it can be used to help you create OERs.
4. Do you want to share your LabSpace-experience here?

Let me finish sharing with you something I have tried recently: co-creating resources with students. My Spanish Literature students have been working on a XVI century play and, rather than having a formal evaluation at the end of the study unit, they created (text and graphic) summaries which we evaluated in order to choose the best materials, which were then uploaded to an entry in the Spanish version of Wikipedia. Not only were they discussing the literary features of the play, but also learning how to use ICT to create and share knowledge, and they feel very proud of having shared their work openly online. Surely this must be good educational practice!

Some Useful Links

Please feel free to add to this list if you come across good stuff!

1. ccLearn ccLearn is a division of Creative Commons which is dedicated to realizing the full potential of the Internet to support open learning and open educational resources (OER) [from its homepage].
2. eduCommons Web community for finding, authoring and sharing learning resources.
3. The FLOSSCom Project "Using the principles of informal learning environments of FLOSS communities to improve ICT supported formal education" [from their homepage]
4. Free and Open Courseware UNESCO keeps an updated (and socially tagged!) list of courseware applications of interest for those who want to get involved in creating OER.
5. LeMill The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning of the Utah State University offers this open courseware management system with which you can develop and manage an open access collection of course materials.
6. "Models for Sustainable OER" by Stephen Downes An interesting article at the Interdisciplinary Journal of Knowledge and Learning Objects
7. OER and Facebook If you access your Facebook account often, you can even stay up-to-date on OER by including this application.
8. OER GrapevineIts mission "is to promote discussion and cooperation among projects relating to open educational resources (OER)" [from its homepage]
   
9. "Open Educational Resources and Practices", by Leigh Blackall Paper presented at the Future of Education conference.
10. UNESCO's Free & Open Source Software Portal
    The UNESCO Free Software Portal gives access to documents and websites which are references for the Free Software/Open Source Technology movement. It is also a gateway to resources related to Free Software. With the Free Software Portal, UNESCO provides a single interactive access point to pertinent information for users who wish to acquire an understanding of the Free Software movement, to learn why it is important and to apply the concept. Visitors to the UNESCO Free Software Portal can browse through pre-established categories or search for specific words. They can add a new link or modify an already existing link. [From its homepage].
11. UNESCO IIEP Community of Interest on OER Run by the International Institute for Educational Planning