In a recent article we discussed Open Educational Resources (often referred to as OER) and shared a great resource for finding and sharing theses OER, the OER Commons website. As a reminder, OER refers to educational resources created by various individuals and organizations that are made available for use by students, teachers, and other educational staff free of charge. The OER Commons is one great place to start if you would like to find quality educational resources that are open for usage, sharing, and manipulation. However if you would like to find out more about the when, how, and why regarding OER usage, the recently released Guidelines for Open Educational Resources will be worth checking into.
The Guidelines for Open Educational Resources was created by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and was launched at the UNESCO General Conference in Paris, France at the end of 2011. These guidelines were developed after the 2009 World Conference on Higher Education noted that eLearning and the usage of OER make access to a quality education a greater possibility for many people. The document itself, which may be found by clicking on this link, states, “their [the Guidelines] purpose is to encourage decision makers in governments and institutions to invest in the systematic production, adaptation and use of OER and to bring them into the mainstream of higher education in order to improve the quality of curricula and teaching and to reduce costs.”
This twenty two page document is presented in an organized and user friendly manner. The first section discusses the purpose and rationale for the creation of these guidelines and how OER impact higher education. This section also provides a brief background of open licensing and the emergence of OER and talks about the potential OER have to influence the world of education. The second section of this publication is broken down into five subsections, each detailing OER guidelines for governments, higher education institutions, academic staff, student bodies, and for quality assurance or accreditation bodies and academic recognition bodies. Each of these subsections is divided into easy to read list format with a brief description of each point in the respective lists. The Guidelines for Open Educational Resources ends with two interesting and useful appendices, “Useful knowledge, competencies and skills for effective OER use in higher education,” and “Promoting more effective and inclusive education by designing OER for the diverse needs of students.”
Given the vast array of OER available, The Guidelines for Open Educational Resources provides an excellent starting point for enabling those in the field of education to use OER appropriately and effectively. This document provides a useful framework of standards to encourage and support the use of OER in higher education on a continuing basis. If you would like to learn more about the Guidelines for Open Educational Resources or to read the document in its entirety, you may access it here: http://www.icde.org/filestore/Resources/Handbooks/GuidelinesforOERinHE.pdf