Open Educational Resources (OER)

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According to United Nations Educational, Science, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) “Open Educational Resources (OERs) are any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license. The nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt and re-share them. OERs range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video and animation” ( UNESCO, 2002). The organization, a forum comprised of many people who were interested in developing together a universal educational resource available for the whole of humanity. The committee chose the term “open educational resources” to describe their efforts.

Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources are defined as “technology-enabled, open provision of educational resources for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users

for non-commercial purposes.” They are typically made freely available over the Web or the Internet. Their principal use is by teachers and educational institutions support course development, but they can also be used directly by students. Open Educational Resources include learning objects such as lecture material, references and readings, simulations, experiments and demonstrations, as well as syllabi,curricula and teachers' guides (Wiley, 2006).

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits sharing, accessing, repurposing—including for commercial purposes—and collaborating with others. Textbooks lack dynamics and flexibility. Advent of internet is making the need for digital curriculum a necessity. Textbooks have created a system where educators do not engage in standards - the need to ditch the script and unpack standards. OER is not about saving money.

The #GoOpen Movement

The #GoOpen movement began 4 years ago with the the help of the U.S. Department of Education to help provide educators with quality materials that are openly licensed (OER) to use in the classroom.  Open Education Resources are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits sharing, accessing, repurposing - including for commercial purposes - and collaborating with others.

Open Educational Resources are openly licensed resource that educators can reuse, revise, remix, redistribute and retain without fear of copyright violations.

Creative Commons

Most projects are using Creative Common Licenses to license their material.  Podcast, screencasting, and videocasting are becoming an increasingly popular way to distribute information. Folksonomic approaches to creating metadata and indexing (“free tagging”) OERs are gaining in popularity with end users (e.g., see http://del.icio.us/ or http://flickr.com/).

Meta-tagging

A folksonomy is the result of a process often called tagging, and involves users applying descriptive keywords to the information they come across. Folksonomies are ad hoc classification schemes invented by web users themselves to categorise the data they find online.

Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page's content; the meta tags don't appear on the page itself, but only in the page's code. We all know tags from blog culture, and meta tags are more or less the same thing, little content descriptors that help tell search engines what a web page is abou