Open Educational Resources (OER)

One of the few new (for myself in my working life at least) bits of information I have picked up on here at ICL is Open Educational Resources (OER). That’s probably because it is outside of my usual area of expertise (which is more the technical implementation of e-Learning), but I found the concept never the less interesting and very similar to the Open Source Software concept which I have been working with for quite a while.

From what I have been picking up at the conference here (and a few
quick searches) there are quite a few projects and UNESCO seems to be particularily active in this arena. One problem that I can see is the fragmentation of this concept and a lack of any delivery standards. But as with all innovations that are in the Early Adopter stage there will have to be a process of consolidation once the dust has settled. From the prospective of a user and potential contributor (as well as for myself in integrating this with various LMS solutions) this obviously creates the problem of which one of the available projects to choose at this stage.

Major projects:

If I have missed anything obvious please let me know. I think these projects deserve some support.

Resources:

Stephen Downes – Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources

As per usual I would be interested in finding out which educators in Australia use and feedback from practical use of these resources.

• Copyright
• E-Learning
• Oer
• Open Educational Resources