Topic: OER Commons has Open Educational Resources (OER) for Teachers!

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OER Commons has Open Educational Resources (OER) for Teachers!

OER Commons
The Future of Education, Co-Created By You

What are OER?

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse at no cost. Unlike fixed, copyrighted resources, OER have been authored or created by an individual or organization that chooses to retain few, if any, ownership rights. In some cases, that means you can download a resource and share it with colleagues and students. In other cases, you may be able to download a resource, edit it in some way, and then re-post it as a remixed work. How do you know your options? OER often have a Creative Commons or GNU license to let you know how the material may be used, reused, adapted, and shared.

What are some examples of OER material?

    Full university courses.
    Interactive mini-lessons and simulations.
    Adaptations of existing open work.
    Electronic textbooks.
    Elementary school and high school (K-12) lesson plans, worksheets, and activities.


Why Use OER Commons?

The hours (and days) spent scouring the Internet for educational resources is time that could be spent teaching and learning. OER Commons helps educators, students, and lifelong learners avoid time-consuming searches and find exactly the right materials. With a single point of access from which they can search, browse, and evaluate resources in OER Commons’ growing collection of over 50,000 high-quality OER everyone can more efficiently find what they need.

The Open Education Movement is not just about cost savings and easy access; it’s about participation and co-creation. Teachers, students, and learning institutions are driving the development of OER. Diving into OER Commons is an exciting opportunity to collaborate with other teachers and learners, at the forefront of a new educational era.




A Brief History of the Commons

ISKME created OER Commons, launched in 2007, to support and build a knowledge base around the use and reuse of open educational resources (OER). As a network for teaching and learning materials, the site offers engagement with resources for curriculum alignment, quality evaluation, social bookmarking, tagging, rating, and reviewing.

OER Commons provides a single point of access to the highest quality content from around the world. Users can search across over 50,000 vetted and fully-indexed OER, ensuring a high level of resource relevancy and discovery. Since these resources are 'open,' they are available for educational use, and many hold Creative Commons licenses that allow them to be repurposed, modified, and adapted for a diverse array of local contexts.

The worldwide OER movement is rooted in the idea that equitable access to high-quality education is a global imperative.

Open Educational Resources (OER) offer opportunities for systemic change in teaching and learning through accessible content, and importantly, through embedding participatory processes and effective technologies for engaging with learning. By leveraging our technical infrastructure and developing teacher training models that facilitate participation with OER, the OER Commons project aims to grow a sustainable culture of sharing among educators at all levels.

OER Commons Partners

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 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 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.

From content, to infrastructure, to policies, OER Commons would not be possible without the contributions of those individuals and organizations that have been working tirelessly to make open content for all a reality. We would like to extend our appreciation to these organizations for their vision, expertise, knowledge sharing, and advice.

https://www.oercommons.org/