The first week of March saw the global open education community commence its annual awareness campaign, Open Education Week. The event drew institutions and organizations from around the world to share Open Educational Resources (OER) on their own websites, on social media [see #OEweek], and via the Open Education Week organizers, Open Education Consortium.
[Refresher: 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 their free use and re-purposing by others. –OERCommons.]
The Open Education Consortium made many of these open resources, shared by the community, available in one centralized location, their repository, the OE Week Library. This is a great place to browse all manner of open resources for learning and teaching, from course modules to textbooks and everything in between. And, of course, it is all openly licensed, and therefore freely available to be used, shared and reused!
Here are just a few of the OER shared with the community during this year’s Open Education Week:
- Creative Commons has a very interesting history. If you’re looking to learn more about Creative Commons (CC) and the open licensing movement that makes open education possible, this CC Certificate Course content is a great place to start. Read the textbook offered here for all the background and history that made open education possible. https://certificates.creativecommons.org/cccertedu/
- Media literacy and the ability to critically evaluate information are absolutely vital skills. This is an adaptable course module for college students. https://www.openeducationweek.org/resources/two-truths-and-a-lie-online-media-literacy-for-young-adults-1
- MIT Faculty have been using open courseware for 20 years! MIT’s Chalk Radio is a podcast series featuring interviews with faculty members who use open courseware and links to all the open courseware material being discussed. https://www.openeducationweek.org/resources/chalk-radio-podcast-series
- Check out this presentation, Equity in Action: OER, a collaboration between three community colleges. https://www.openeducationweek.org/resources/equity-in-action-oer
For more discussion of equity and Open Educational Resources see our previous blog post here.
And for an introduction to OER including a plethora of definitions, tips and resources, see our Open Touro OER Initiative libguide.
contributed by Kirk Snyder, Open Educational Resources & Instruction Librarian, Touro College Libraries, Midtown.
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