Blink Tower
Open Education and Open Educational Resources (OERs) provide equal opportunity for learning and education, regardless of where one lives in the world or the socio-economic environment that exists. Those living in developing countries, not just industrialized countries, can access the same quality education, despite barriers such as limited access to brick and mortar classrooms, lack of teaching resources, limited funds, etc.
A recent Blackboard Collaborate session with Clint Lalonde of BCCampus, regarding their Open Textbook project (moderated by Dr. Alec Couros, instructor for a VIU course on Open Educational Resources), has clearly highlighted the increased educational cost for students these days, particularly with regard to the cost of textbooks and course materials (see Slideshare below). Therefore, open educational resources (OER) provide an increasingly important educational service: the availability of free and open access to curriculum materials. Students, educators, and others may access materials to support teaching practice and learning in a “flexible, equitable, collaborative and participatory manner.”
As stated on the About page of the OER Commons, “Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that you may freely use and reuse, without charge. That means they have been authored or created by an individual or organization that chooses to retain few, if any, ownership rights…OER often have a Creative Commons or GNU license that states specifically how the material may be used, reused, adapted, and shared.”
Open educational resources can also be categorized into varying realms of openness. As Christina Hendricks notes in her blog What is Open Education?, financial, legal, technological, and social openness should be evaluated when considering the usage of OERs (see Christina’s blog to read more on these areas).
OER Commons, a freely accessible online library, provides teachers and others access to a large bank of teaching and learning materials, strategies, and curricula. OER Commons, publicly launched in February 2007 to support the use and reuse of open educational resources (OER), was created by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), “an independent, education non-profit established in 2002, whose mission is to improve the practice of continuous learning, collaboration, and change in the education sector” (video about ISKME). Educators may submit to the OER Commons their own contributions for digital curation, and materials are subject to quality review and alignment to educational standards (i.e., the Common Core State Standards). OER materials are then shared, primarily under Creative Commons licenses.