This document discusses open educational resources (OER). It defines OER as teaching and learning materials that are freely available online for anyone to use, such as courses, modules, syllabi, lectures, assignments, and other resources. OER allow resources to be reused, revised, remixed, and redistributed. The document outlines several benefits of OER, such as engaging students worldwide and enhancing collaboration. It also discusses some challenges of OER, including issues around copyright and ensuring quality. Overall, the document provides an overview of what OER are and their role in teaching and learning.

1. Commonwealth Educational
Media Centre for Asia
Understanding Open
Educational Resources (OER)
Manas Ranjan Panigrahi, Programme officer, CEMCA, New Delhi

2. OER Introduction:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xGRztrWv-k (2:36 Minuit)

3. Open Educational Resources
“The Open Courseware
concept is based on the
philosophical view of
knowledge as a
collective social
product and so it is also
desirable to make it a
social property”
– VS Prasad.

4. What is OER?
Source: http://bit.ly/oerinfokit
Open Educational Resources are teaching and learning
materials that are freely available online for every one
to use, whether you are an instructor, student or self-
learner.
Examples of OER include: full courses, course modules,
syllabi, lectures, homework assignments, games,
simulations, and many more resources contained in
digital media collections from around the world.
OER Commons

5. OER Concept
 Digital teaching, learning, research
resources in public domain or released
under intellectual property license permit
free use/re-purposing by educators,
students, self-learners and others
 OER includes learning content, software
tools to develop, use and distribute
content, and implementation of resources
such as open licenses

6. Role of OER in Teaching and Learning
 OER will be playing an important role in the future in
dissemination of learning resources. The advantages of
use of OER are many viz.
i.) Grab learners’ attention;
ii.) Focus concentration;
iii.) Generate interest;
iv.) Create a sense of anticipation;
v.) Energize or relax for learning exercise;
vi.) Draw imagination;
vii.) Improve attitudes toward content and learning;
viii.) Build a connection with other scholars, educators
and instructors;

7. ix.) Increase memory of content;
x.) Increase understanding of subject/content;
xi.) Foster creativity;
xii.) Stimulate the flow of ideas;
xiii.) Foster deeper learning;
xiv.) Provide an opportunity for freedom of expression;
xv.) Serve as a vehicle for collaboration;
xvi.) Inspire and motivate;
xvii.) Make learning fun;
xviii.) Set an appropriate mood or tone;
xiv.) Decrease anxiety and tension on scary topics; xx.)
Create memorable visual images.
Role of OER in Teaching and Learning

8.  Three kinds of ‘openness’ cover a range of
academic functions, from production to
organization to distribution, and their
development and use in the academy offer great
potential for shaping practices in teaching,
research and management.
 Open Sources: Whether a matter of structure
 Open Access: Protocols for informational
organization
 Open Content: Pure content
Indicators in OER

9. What makes a good OER?
 Findable
 Clearly discribed
 From a trusted source
 Easily adapted
 Free of copyrighted
content
 Crowd recommended

10. OER making process
 Get resources
 Create
 Localise
 Remix
 Licensing
 Use
 Redistribute
4R-framework of four
rights:
1.Reuse;
2.Revise;
3.Remix;
4.Redistribute
(Wiley, 2009)

11. Benefits of OER
 Engagement of students worldwide
 Enhancing marketing
 Engagement with employers
 Brokering collaboration and partnerships
 Sustaining vulnerable subjects
 Enrichment of contents and courses

12. OER: Guidance and Policy
 Make the formal decision to use OER in
the curriculum
 Develop a strategy to ascertain where
OER would work
 Promote, provide training and support to
staff to use OER in course design and
development
 Measure the effects of using OER and
incorporate findings to strengthen the
message

13. CHALLENGES AND
LIMITATIONS OF OER

14. Copyright issues
 Copyright is the right of the originator to control the
publication and replication of work.
 Open licensing is a solution to the copy right worries
of academicians. It offers a way out for controlled
sharing with some rights confined to authors.
 There are several open content licenses such as
Creative Commons and the GNU Free Documentation
Licence which introduces a certainty and clarity in
the process of obtaining permission to use the work of
others.
 Finally, open licenses establish a body of works
licensed as “open content” that may be freely
shared.

15. Quality assurance
 Quality Approaches:
 Branding: Before releasing the resources on to
the web, through internal check the institutions
make sure the quality.
 Peer review: this technique is one of the most
used quality assurance processes in academia.
There are also arguments for using peer review
schemes to guarantee the quality of resources in
a repository.
 Quality management: let individual users decide
on whatever ground they like whether a learning
resource is of high quality, useful, or good in any
other respect.

16. Sustainability of OER
 Some of the aspects need to consider are:
 Technical considerations such as discoverability of the
resources;
 The kind of openness and constraints on access and use that
is given users;
 Different content models (the possibility to localise
content) and issues of licensing;
 Different staffing models and incentives for people to
contribute resources;
 Alternative workflows to the traditional design—use—
evaluation model, to models without a clear distinction
between production and use or between the user and the
producer. The concept of co-production is important here.
 Maintenance and updating of resources.

17. Developing Ecosystem of OER
 OER in abundance does not
make learning happen
 Concern over quality of OERs
 Integration of OER in the
teaching-learning process
 Certification of students
learning through OER and
MOOCs
 Rethink education in the
context of the network learning
in the era of OER, and help
MOOCs to be game changer

18. Concluding Remarks
 OERs will increase access to knowledge resources
 Publicly funded organisations have a
responsibility to share and disseminate
information for the benefit of all. It should be
their ethics to the knowledge community.
 For individual academicians/users this is their
ethics, to participate in a community of practice
around OER in which sharing of resources and
expertise is expected and valued.
 We need to have collective thinking on ways to
further democratise education with OER-Quality.

19. Thank You