Category Archives: OER

I Have Seen the Future — and it includes Open Educational Resources (OER)

OER, Open Educational Resources, Professional Development, Schedule Development,

What are OERs?

Open educational resources (OER) are digital materials that can be re-used for teaching, learning, research and more, made available for free through open licenses, which allow uses of the materials that would not be easily permitted under copyright alone.[1]

A key part of OERs is that they are  available under a Creative Commons License which permits the re-use and even re-mixing of educational resources.

There are a number of repositories available providing a range of resources from learning objects through to complete courses. Here are some examples:

Wikieducator

BCcampus’ Shareable Online Learning Resources

National Repository of Online Courses

OER Commons

Open Courseware Consortium

YouTube.com

To see more about what I’ve written about Open Educational Resoures, enter OER into the search box on the top right of the screen.

Pearson Introduce OpenClass

MathXL, OER, Open Educational Resources, , , , ,

Some interesting developments in online education platforms. Pearson Publishing who provides the MathXL platform I use for teaching online is introducing OpenClass. It is a new kind of learning management system that is offered through the ‘Cloud‘ via Google Apps for Education.

OpenClass will be offered free of charge. A beta version is supposed to be available October 18th. Pearson’s model is to provide and charge for curriculum content. However, other content providers will also be able to make use of the platform.

For more details see the press release here. See their website at http://www.joinopenclass.com. A promotional video, without much in the way of details, is available here.

This development could very well be the ‘game changer’ Pearson claims it to be. The demand for online learning continues to grow, here in BC and around the world.