This document discusses open educational resources (OER) and open courseware (OCW) which consist of freely accessible electronic educational materials. It provides examples of OER repositories like MIT OpenCourseWare which has made course materials from 1800 courses freely available online. The document lists several additional repositories and resources for OER, learning objects, open access journals, document sharing, and creative commons licensed educational content.

1. Live your life. Create your destiny.
Open Educational Resources (OER) & Open Courseware
(OCW) in the Classroom

2. Live your life. Create your destiny.
OER
The open educational resources movement
• consists of freely accessible electronic access to
course materials
• involves other aspects such as open access to
books and library materials, and access to
modules of educational information instead of
complete courses.
• It may also include educational communication
tools or implementation resources as well.

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OER
• Essentially, it is teaching, learning, and research
resources, content or otherwise, which reside in
the public domain or have been released under
an intellectual-property license that permits their
free use or repurposing by others. This may
include learning content, tools such as software,
or implementation resources such as methods
or principles.
http://www.olcos.org/

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OER
• Their intention, overall, is to foster learning and
the acquisition of competencies in both teachers
and learners.
• A good place to start for open educational
resources is:
http://oerrecommender.org/
http://discovered.creativecommons.org/search/

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Learning objects
• Learning objects are small, reusable pieces of
instructional material
• http://www.merlot.org/
• http://academicearth.org/
• http://cnx.org/

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Open Courseware
• The OpenCourseWare (OCW) aspect of the
open learning initiative was dedicated to the
development of freely available, stand-alone
college-level online course and teaching
materials

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MIT OCW
• MIT has perhaps the most well known OCW
project known to date at http://ocw.mit.edu/
• The MIT OCW initiative has made content from
all of their approximately 1800 courses available
on the Internet at no cost for non-commercial
purposes

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MIT OCW
• MIT’s OCW is visited over 1.2 million times per
month from individuals around the globe with the
help of nearly 80 mirror sites on university
campuses

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MIT OCW
Educator uses include:
• planning a course (26%),
• preparing to teach a class (22%), and
• enhancing personal knowledge (19%)

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OCW Consortium
• An OCW consortium is found at
http://www.ocwconsortium.org/
• http://www.ocwfinder.com/
• http://ocw.mit.edu/
• http://oyc.yale.edu/
• http://webcast.berkeley.edu/
• http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/

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Reference Materials & Resource Repositories
• http://www.edlproject.eu/
• http://books.google.com/googlebooks/library.html
• http://www.wikipedia.org/
• http://www.oercommons.org
• http://www.loc.gov/
• http://www.nasa.gov/

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Social Bookmarking
Share links:
• http://delicious.com/
•
http://www.trailfire.com/annearendt/trailview/82532
• http://digg.com/
• http://www.citeulike.org/

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Open Access Journals & Publications
http://www.doaj.org/

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Document sharing
• http://works.bepress.com/
• http://www.mendeley.com/
• http://dspace.mit.edu/
• http://280slides.com/
• http://docs.google.com/

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Creative Commons & CC Learn
• Creative Commons which frees materials from
automatically applied copyright restrictions by
providing free, easy-to-use, flexible licenses for
creators to place on their digital materials that
permit the originator to grant rights as they see
fit
http://creativecommons.org/
• ccLearn focuses specifically on open learning
and open educational resources
http://learn.creativecommons.org/

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Conclusion
As Smith & Casserly note, “we are aware that all
creators of knowledge need a place to put their
materials and that flow of knowledge should be
multidirectional and adaptable to the local learning
environment”.