Open education resources are the free educational (learning, research, and teaching) material that is available in the public domain. These can be available in digital or any other form. These resources have an open license which means material available here can be used, access, and redistribute by anyone with no cost or fee. David Wiley is the founder of Lumen Learning. When he made this platform with his colleague, he suggested that these Open education resources are based on five principles. Individuals can reuse the Open education resources for their usage or purpose. Open education resources can be distributed by anyone. These Open education resources can be edited and modified by individuals. People can use two or more resources and combine them to make a new resource for them. According to experts of assignment writing services, there are no digital right restrictions for Open education resources.
Types of Open Education Resources:
Open Courseware:
Open courseware includes college and university level course publications that are free and openly available. These educational materials are categorized as courses and include tools for evaluation, and course planning material.
Learning Modules:
The learning module is a collection of study content that is organized and arranged in sequential order, for supporting the main course. The learning module contains the breakdown of the course material with the purpose of providing guidance to the students about the content of the course and assessment related to it. If an instructor wants he can add different links, text, and images to the content module for better understanding.
Open Textbooks:
The books that are available on the internet with an open license and anyone including students, teacher, and researcher can use them. These open textbooks are available in printed form, in form of the e-book over the internet, and form of audiobooks.
Streaming Videos:
The videos that are continuously available on the internet for free are called streaming videos. Streaming videos can be viewed without downloading. The user just needs to install a specific player for viewing them. Sometimes this player is already installed with the browser and if it is not available you need to install it.
Open Access Journals:
Open access journals contain research articles that are available to the public freely. Anyone can access them and read them online and even download them at any cost.
Repositories of Open Education Resources
- Open education resources can be found on OER Commons which is a digital library created and owned by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME). ISKME is more than 70000 Open education resources through their OER Commons. They are gathering these sources from Harvard and the British Library. OER Commons is a very useful tool for finding any educational resource you need.
- For finding the open courseware you can use MIT OCW. Both instructors and students can get benefit from it. It has options for finding the desired course by topic.
- Lumen learning s so a course and related education material finding course but it i=s not entirely free. It provides courses for more than fifty subjects.
- Merlot is also a digital library that is providing more than forty thousand digital materials. The best thing about Merlot is that its content is even reviewed and rated by its most of the users and these users include researcher and educators.
- OpenStax is an open education source provided by Rice University. This open-source gives all students open access to high-quality textbooks that re-reviewed by the peers. It has books on subjects like science, business, maths, and humanities. It also contains more than 1500 lecture videos. It has both the options of downloading the video and saving it in your playlist. The practice question of the books available on OpenStax is made available on another open education resource repository, Learningpod. Learning pod is providing the practice questions of all the books available on OpenStax. Teachers can use Learningpod to assign students practice questions. Students have to solve these questions on Learningpod and the teacher can monitor their progress through Learningpod.
- If you want to access the learning material from world top universities like MIT, Yale, Stanford, and Berkeley, you need to visit academia earth. There are more than 500 videos related to lectures.
For cultural and education-related documents and media, you can use open culture. Open culture is the awarded repository OD open education source. It was given the award due to the provision of all kinds of certificate courses, e-books, audiobooks, and MOOCs.
