Open+Educational+Resources

Open Educational Resources

The future of education is dependent on individuals of all walks around the world coming together to collaborate and organize systems that path the way for sustaining education. One such system derived from this collaboration is the idea and practice of Open Education Resources.

What Are OERs?
Open Education Resources has a number of definitions, but is widely defined by[| The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation]as high-quality, openly licensed, online educational materials that offer an extraordinary opportunity for people everywhere to share, use, and reuse knowledge. In other words, it may be any type of educational material that’s freely available for teachers and students to use, adapt, share, and reuse.

OERs are largely funded by grants and private donations. In the beginning and continues today to be largely funded by [|The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation]. Since 2002, the Hewlett Foundation has worked with OER grantees to improve education globally by making high-quality academic materials openly available on the Internet. The Education Program continues to work toward establishing a self-sustaining and adaptive global OER ecosystem and demonstrating its potential to improve teaching and learning.

For 2011 and beyond, the Program's OER investments will focus primarily on supporting:
 * The infrastructure needed to sustain a well-functioning open educational ecosystem
 * Demonstration projects that strengthen student access to deeper learning in K-12 and community colleges

OERs can be an entire course, a complete book, or even a single learning object where individuals share interoperable content and tools. Students are already taking advantage of such resources in the software area. A number of students have access to technology in the home, but do not have the luxury of productive software packages such a Microsoft Office. The continued existence and practice of OERs has allowed students to turn to OpenOffice, a comparable software, in its place.

Bases of OERs
The bases of OERs is that teaching and learning resources are provided for **free** under a copyright license that grants a user permission to engage in the "4R" activities:
 * Reuse: the right to reuse the content in its unaltered/verbatim form (e.g., make a backup copy of the content)
 * Revise: the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
 * Remix: the right to combine the original or revised content with other content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
 * Redistribute: the right to share copies of the original content, the revisions, or the remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

This is why individuals who have a love for life long learning are so attracted to OERs. It is the 4 Rs that gives educators hope for the future of education. See an example of how educators and learners are spreading the word of OERs in the use of

According to David Wiley, Professor at Brigham Young University who believes in working toward open education for everyone, the 4 Rs of Open Educational Resources lends itself to learning objects.
 * Re-usability: once created, a Learning Object should function in different instructional contexts
 * Accessibility: the Learning Object should be tagged so that it can be stored and referenced in a database
 * Interoperability: the Learning Object should be independent of both the delivery media and knowledge management systems
 * Durability: this all adds up to sustainability

OERs Benefits

 * **4 Rs**: The freedom to reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute.
 * ** Cost ** : Affordability means greater access. David Wiley believes those with access will begin to outperform those who don’t.
 * [[image:thinning_walls.jpg width="291" height="130" align="right" caption="http://www.flickr.com/photos/courosa/3292377555/"]] **Personal Learning Networks, PLNs**: Students and teachers begin to develop their own PLNs.

Throughout the use of open educational resources, knowledge is negotiated, managed, and exchanged. According to Alec Couros, a professor at Regina University, it become the process of paying it forward interactions and meaningful collaborations that begin to break away the classroom walls overtime.

Example OERs At Work
media type="youtube" key="sTYAEn7xLaM" height="256" width="451" align="right" A recent emergence of OER support comes from Michael Jones, an educator, who recently started Open Equal Freein 2011. He is devoted to developing the world's largest and best database of open educational resources while also working closely with nonprofits in the developing world to improve the work they do.  His ultimate goal is to develop the world’s largest and best open educational resources. View the video to hear why he believes phenomenal learning can occur in any educational system on any budget with access to open educational resources.

OERs Support
The overall goal of OERs is to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning by increasing the quantity and quality of materials. They demonstrate great potential for instructional innovation as networks of teachers and learners share best practices. As a result, it is apparent that OERs play a vital role in sustaining the future of education. The availability of OERs continues to grow daily. Listed below are four out of the many OERs in existence and ready to be taken advantage of.
 * **[|Open Educational Resources Commons]** website contains a wide variety of “free-to-use teaching and learning content from around the world”.
 * **ODEPO (Open Database of Educational Projects and Organizations)** is a wiki-database of organizations involved in providing educational content online.
 * **MERLOT**is a leading edge, user-centered, collection of peer reviewed higher education, online learning materials.
 * **OpenCourseWareConsortium** is a worldwide community of hundreds of universities and associated organizations committed to advancing OpenCourseWare, a free and open digital publication of high quality university‐level educational materials, and its impact on global education. MIT, Massachusetts Institute for Technology, have created the ideal model of providing open course ware.

media type="youtube" key="a_e0cOCw730" height="315" width="560" align="right" To keep open educational resources alive for the sake of connecting life-long learners and enriching the learning experience, we need to spread the word of OERs and their value to adapting to current and future learning scenarios.

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