Open University of the UK will Launch its Open Content Initiative in October 2006, see http://oci.open.ac.uk/
What is Open Education Resources?
OER are teaching, learning and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials or techniques used to support access to knowledge.
Why are we funding OER?
At the heart of the movement toward Open Educational Resources is the simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the Worldwide Web in particular provide an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge. OER are the parts of that knowledge that comprise the fundamental components of education - content and tools for teaching, learning and research.
What are our Goals?
The year 2008 marks the shift of Open Educational Resources (OER) to an independent initiative within the Education Program. In this next phase of work, we will focus on building a sustainable infrastructure to support OER and on demonstrating how OER can help transform teaching and learning worldwide. Building a robust infratructure involves developing strong core agencies, building effective networks of organizations worldwide, establishing ongoing partnerships, clarifying intellectual property issues, setting best practice guidelines, designing viable sustainable models, conducting research, and creating metrics.
What Do We Focus On?
To demonstrate OER's capacity to transform teaching and learning, we will support pilot projects that will enable a world of users to adapt and modify content to meet their own language, cultural, and pedagogical needs. The pilot demonstrations will harness the power of the Web to engage, motivate, and stimulate learning in ways unique to open online environments. We have initiated demonstration clusters in three areas:
- Game-based environments for teaching complex material
- Open textbooks
- Research and development of open participatory learning environments
In 2009, we will add teacher training as a fourth demonstration cluster.
Together, the two goals highlight the aspects of OER that make it unique and powerful. The first goal supports the worldwide equalization of access to knowledge, a promise that has never even been imagined in the past. It will be supported by a strategy to create a usstainable infrastructure that addresses the legal, technical, cultural, social, political, and financial considerations affective OER.
The second goal will build on the elements of OER that make it especially suited to transform teaching and learning. The ability of users and experts to give feedback online and modify open content enables the rapid improvement, development, and adaptation of material to fit different purposes, languages, and cultures. This aspect of openness helps equalize access to high-quality and useful materials and engages users in making content changes that create efficiencies and reduce costs. Further, when students and teachers transform materials, this itself is a creative, powerful act of learning. Together, the two broad dimensions of openness give us opportunities to rethink traditional notions of where, when, and how people teach and learn, so that we can explore alternative paths to meet educational demand.
