If you are personally or professionally involved in the realm of elearning, chances are you have heard of Open Educational Resources. Open Educational Resources, commonly referred to as OER, are basically educational resources that support teaching and learning that anyone may use (and reuse) free of charge. The resources are created by people or organizations that choose not to keep any ownership rights of the resources so the OER are given limited or unrestricted licensing rights. It is these limited or unrestricted licensing rights that give the resources there name, “open”, because they are open to use, reproduce, edit, and share freely. As taken from the OER Commons website, some examples of OER include: full university courses, complete with readings, videos of lectures, homework assignments, and lecture notes; interactive mini-lessons and simulations about a specific topic, such as math or physics; adaptations of existing open work; electronic textbooks that are peer-reviewed and frequently updated; or elementary school and high school (K-12) lesson plans, worksheets, and activities that are aligned with state standards. Many people in the field of education and elearning are aware of these OER, but because these resources can be anywhere and everywhere tracking down useful materials can be somewhat overwhelming. This is where the Open Educational Resources Commons can help.
The Open Educational Resources Commons, or OER Commons, is a website that was created to assist teachers, students, and others in the field of education in finding OER that exist somewhere on the Internet. And this is not just a clearinghouse for every resource posted on the Internet; OER Commons staff reviews each resource before making it available on their website. The OER Commons is not designed to be merely a search engine or list of links, but a structured knowledge base of high-quality OER that are found online. The OER Commons website explains further, “As a network for teaching and learning materials, the web site offers engagement with resources in the form of social bookmarking, tagging, rating, and reviewing. OER Commons has forged alliances with over 120 major content partners to provide a single point of access through which educators and learners can search across collections to access over 30,000 items, find and provide descriptive information about each resource, and retrieve the ones they need. By being “open,” these resources are publicly available for all to use, and principally through Creative Commons licensing, many thousands are legally available for repurposing, modifying and improving.”
The OER Commons website is well worth your time to explore. The landing page introduces users to handy recommended resources from links to open textbooks, to a selection of classroom management techniques, to subsection called Art as Inquiry and much more. You can search for resources by grade level, subject matter, and terms of use. By registering on the website through a super simple and free registration process, you can participate in discussions and mark items you find interesting to be saved in a “my items” section of the website. You can also rate, comment on, and tag resources you find on the website or even contribute content that will be reviewed by OER Commons staff. If you would like to investigate this fine resource for yourself, visit http://www.oercommons.org/ .