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"Open Educational Resources (OER) offer opportunities for increasing equity and access to high-quality K-12 education. Many state education agencies now have offices devoted to identifying and using OERs and other digital resources in their states. To help states, districts, teachers, and other users determine the degree of alignment of OERs to the Common Core State Standards, and to determine aspects of quality of OERs, Achieve has developed eight rubrics in collaboration with leaders from the OER community (download link for rubrics below). To allow users to apply these rubrics and evaluate the quality of instructional resources, Achieve partnered with OER Commons to develop an online evaluation tool. OER Commons, an online repository for open education resources, is now hosting the tool and its resulting evaluation data. Every resource available on OER Commons contains an "Evaluate Resource" button that will direct users to the evaluation tool. The coding for the tool is freely available online here. Resources rated on OER Commons will create a pool of metadata, and this metadata will be shared through the Learning Registry with other interested repositories."

"Abstract Open educational resources (OER) raise many similar issues for education to those that have surrounded Learning Objects (LO). However the greater use and availability of digital technologies and open licensing seems to be enabling OER to have wider acceptance into individual and institutional teaching practice. While the need for appropriate design in teaching and learning on the part of educators, which was the primary driver of developments in LO, remains, the very openness of OER is changing the relationships between educators, learners and content (resources) and is becoming a primary agent of change. Experience in OpenLearn, a major initiative to provide OER from The Open University, indicates that some of these changes can be planned for while others will emerge as releasing content openly imposes evolutionary pressures that accelerate change and work around barriers. Development can then be driven by learner expectations of the technology and needs for informal life-long learning that in turn impact on how content is being designed and openly presented. It is argued that this represents a shift from a teacher-centric, systematic model of change in teaching practices as embodied in earlier ideas about LO to a learner-centric, systemic model of change as embodied in OER."

"University libraries are well positioned to run or support OER production and publication operations. Many university libraries already have the technical, service, and policy infrastructure in place that would provide economies of scale for nascent and mature OER projects. Given a number of aligning factors, the University of Michigan (U-M) has an excellent opportunity to integrate Open.Michigan, its OER operation, into the University Library. This paper presents the case for greater university library involvement in OER projects generally, with U-M as a case study."

" Project Start Date: 2006 A wide range of individuals and organizations are actively involved in the development of free-to-use open educational resources (OER). Because the field is so new, there have been few opportunities to share learnings and advances across projects and boundaries. Little is known, for example, about how projects are facilitating the adaptation of open content by diverse users, what structures they are instilling to support peer production, and how they are attempting to inspire community engagement. Our Role: ISKME has worked with six projects to help them build capacity to track, analyze and share key developments in open educational resources (OER), and in the practices and models that play a role in project sustainability. The aim was to enable projects to discover unknown or untapped potential, to facilitate decision making around which practices to change or maintain, and to learn how other OER projects have overcome similar challenges. In addition, it sought to advance the field at large by contributing new knowledge on which others can build. The participating OER projects include: * CurriculumNet (Uganda) * Curriki (United States) * Free High School Science Texts (South Africa) * Mission 2007 Training Commons (India) * Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (United States) * Teachers' Domain (United States) "

"OER-101 is an open, self-paced online community course that has been built to demonstrate how to find, adapt, and develop OERs step-by-step. These OERs may then be licensed via Creative Commons, printed and bound, and integrated into any type of learning environment. The course is organized into five "pursuits," each of which represents one facet of the world of OERs. Participants are encouraged to complete all of the pursuits by following the suggested course progression, but each pursuit can also be completed individually."

"Locating, Creating, Licensing and Utilizing OERs (OER-101)"

"The project analyses and maps the scale and scope of initiatives regarding "open educational resources" (OER) in terms of their purpose, content, and funding. It looks into different sustainable cost/benefits models and intellectual property right issues linked to OER initiatives. Furthermore we address questions regarding incentives and barriers for universities and faculty staff to deliver their material to OER initiatives and how to improve access and usefulness for users of OER initiatives."

"This post will review existing literature on Open Educational Resources, introducing five critiques: 1.) An under-theorisation of 'openness', in which the concepts of positive and negative liberty will be used to suggest a neglect of coherent theorisation concerning the practice of self-directed learning. 2.) The simultaneous privileging and rejection of institutional authority, where OER literature will be shown to endorse the reputations of established institutions while claiming liberation from them. 3.) The diminishing of the role of pedagogy, in which OER will be aligned with an untheorised learner-centred model of education. 4.) Humanistic assumptions of unproblematic self-direction and autonomy, and 5.) an alignment with the needs of capital, in which a Foucauldian interpretation of subjectivity will offer alternative perspectives on the notions of power and emancipation in OER discourse. "

David Wiley on definining OER: "Below, I work from the position that "an ideal OER would help every person in the world attain all the education they desire." In this specific context, I believe the ideal OER would have three characteristics. It would: 1. Be always, immediately, and freely accessible by every person in the world 2. Grant the user the legal permissions necessary to engage in each and every possible usage of the resource with no restrictions whatsoever 3. Effectively support the educational goals of the user"

"Pearson's latest approach to open educational resources (OER) - the free online learning materials that have proliferated over the last decade and a half, posing a threat to traditional publishers. The education and media company today wil unveil Project Blue Sky, a search engine to help instructors locate free materials from popular OER repositories."

Pearson again. These guys are on the march.

"with OER comes a few key professional development challenges. The vast quantity of resources--tested and untested alike--available online is one key hurdle. Helping instructors develop a mindset around "constant revision" and encouraging ongoing open course development are two other tricky areas that can make or break an institution's OER initiative."

"OER is a very complicated issue. But it is one worth trying to solve. Lowering costs for students is fundamental to providing fair access to higher education for those who seek it. We need smart, sustainable business models for OER that don't simply shift costs from one place to another, or reduce the overall quality of the materials we offer students. We need the highest quality instructional material at the lowest possible price."

"Open Educational Resources (OER) offer higher education governance leaders a cost-efficient method of improving the quality of teaching and learning while at the same time reducing costs imposed on students related to the purchase of expensive commercial textbooks and learning materials. Leading scholars around the world are already participating in the OER movement even without support from most higher education institutions, including community colleges. Higher education governance officials, particularly boards of trustees and senior academic governance leaders, have a tremendous opportunity to harness the advantages of OER for their institutions. "

"UNESCO and Commonwealth of Learning are two global organisations that are championing the open learning cause and have just published the results of a major survey: Survey on Governments' Open Educational Resources (OER) Policies. They sent out a questionnaire to all 195 UNESCO member states asking them whether they had any policies concerning the use of OER in the country's schools and universities. Less than half (82) of these countries replied in time but the results show that there are countries who are taking open education seriously and beginning to form national strategies around the open sharing of educational material. "

"Gary Lopez, MITE's Executive Director, whose educational publishing career spans commercial as well as OER experience, has an interesting perspective. He positions foundation-supplied capital as the seed for the heavy lifting required for creating rigorous OER instructional packages, sustained by institutional membership fees for a bundle of enterprise-level services. What we used to call a free trial, and what the digital world now speaks of as freemium, is morphing into a series of business strategies that give customers a free taste and then offer fee-based elements that enhance the value proposition. Let's look at some from the education arena. "

" The main areas of library's involvement are: description and classification, management, preservation, dissemination, and promotion of OER. In order to support these activities, librarians provided expertise in information science areas, especially: metadata standards, vocabularies, indexing and classification, information retrieval, information literacy, and repository technology and management. It was also found, however, that librarians needed to develop expertise in different areas, including SEO and IPR and licensing options, but mainly about e-learning and OER knowledge, technologies and standards."

"Colleges and universities have no reason to view OER as a threat. On the contrary, OER can help institutions provide higher education to rapidly increasing numbers of students and lifelong learners. Traditional colleges and universities, with their experience and reputation, are in a good position to further develop online teaching, testing, learning communities, and certification."

Anka Mulder is President of the OpenCourseWare Consortium and Secretary General of Delft University of Technology, Netherlands. Comments on this article can be posted to the web via the link at the bottom of this page. Open Educational Resources (OER) have become an unstoppable development since MIT started publishing educational resources online as OpenCourseWare (OCW) in 2001.

"Teachers and students cut and paste text from OER sites all the time-usually that's where the story ends. The OER site doesn't know what text was cut, nor how it might be used. Enter CaPRéT: Cut and Paste Reuse Tracking. OER sites that are CaPRéT-enabled can now better understand how their content is being used."

"This Open Education project has two main strands: We are developing an e-book which will be a collection of university academics' narratives about their experiences of learning and teaching in their discipline. We are engaging with institutional policy surrounding OER resources as well afunding OERs."

"This chapter looks at the production and promotion of health open educational resources (OER) at the University of Ghana (UG) and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). Both institutions initially chose to produce materials from scratch rather than build upon existing OER, and then subsequently shared the materials through a global distribution network to advance health education across the continent. T"