"Open Educational Resources: The Education Ecosystem Comes to Life" by opensourceway is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
The abrupt shift to remote learning caused by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2019 forced many schools, administrators, and educators to locate high-quality, shareable digital materials to share with their newly remote students and free, web-based tools and resources to help facilitate distance learning. For many, this challenging moment was a time to reflect on their practice and reimagine what is possible. Though in-person learning has returned for many educators, the lessons learned and resources discovered during remote learning continue to impact what and how they teach. In this there is an opportunity to expand understanding, access, and use of open educational resources (OER).
UNESCO defines OER as “teaching, learning and research materials in any medium...that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.”
A chief characteristic of OER is freedom of distribution and use as expressed in the 5R’s:
A few reasons to use OER include: to increase equity by providing all students with up-to-date materials that are freely available; empowering educators as collaborative and creative professionals with materials that can be adapted and customized according to the their needs and those of their students; empower students as collaborative and creative learners by letting them create, customize, and share their learning materials and products; to participate in a movement toward a more democratic, creative, and open future.
The aim of this LibGuide is to introduce the topics of open education and open educational resources and to connect education with materials, resources, tools to access, use, create, and share open educational resources. A further goal is to connect educators with a reflective and reflexive community of learners working toward a more open educational future. It is an evolving (and expanding) collection of resources and we welcome collaboration, contributions, and feedback.
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